On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 11:18:38AM +1000, Dan Washusen wrote: > On Tue, 2002-04-02 at 11:01, Wylie Edwards wrote: > > If I upgrade to xp and it kills the > > boot loader, how do I get it back? > > I think XP would kill lilo. But it's really easy to get it back... > > [6 step process omitted]
I find it really amusing/disturbing that such a common problem has such a complicated solution. IMHO, the RH/Mandrake/whatever install CD should have an option (alongside "Install", "Upgrade" and friends?) to "reactivate" a linux distro. The main problem with this is, if there are multiple distro's installed, you're not sure which grub or lilo configuration to use. So, it can't be made completely "luser-proof" :( But, most lusers would only have 1 distro anyway... Perhaps the best solution is to make grub/lilo add a timestamp inside their config files when the bootloader is INSTALLED, and the auto-reinstaller looks for the config file with the newest timestamp? (Obviously, this is different from the mtime... we want the file that was USED for an installation last, not UPDATED last) Unfortunately, this seems to be against grub philosophy... grub doesn't have a central config file for installing the first (and a half ;) stage bootloaders... nor to say which menulist, etc. it's using. More fundamentally, the grub installer might not even have a way of writing to the file system (and therefore, no way to write timestamps). It seems the only way out of the mess is by grub telling some initscript (via linux commandline? grub=(blah)/boot/menu.lst), and the initscript can do it's timestamp magic. Ideas? Andrew _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub