On 16/08/16 00:09, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Adam Borowski (kilobyte@???):
>

>
>> Or, the first disk gets assigned a different position.
>
> Which happens when exactly? Because you're screwing around with
> swapping in and out different HBAs? Well, if you're doing that, see


Actually, this exact reason is why I moved from Lilo to Grub a few moons
ago.

It happens *when* one of the primary OS drives dies in your server and
you get a reboot before you have a chance to fix the array.

Example (because this is what triggered the move for me). You have a
RAID1 with your root and boot on it. LILO is installed on those disks,
and you can tell the BIOS to boot from either and it works just fine.
One of those drives goes titsup and before you've had a chance to deal
with it (because it's in an office 13,000km away) you get a power outage
that exceeds the runtime of the UPS. The system cleanly shuts down and
never comes back up because LILO does not cope with the fact the BIOS
has re-ordered the drives.

Grub copes with this just fine. Slip the drive into any slot and the
bios will search for the first disk with a viable boot sector and loads
the grub 1st stage. Grub searches for its second stage, finds it and
you're good to go.

Of course there might be user error in there, but I spend an *awful* lot
of time trying to make Lilo work in what were fairly simple failure
scenarios before giving up and moving to Grub.