On 16/08/16 11:50, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Brad Campbell (lists2009@???):
>
>> 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.
>
> What a pity you never read the tip in the Boot+Root+Raid+LILO HOWTO that
> I referred to upthread:
>
> # BIOS=line -- if your bios is smart enough (most are not) to detect
> that that the first disk is missing or failed and will automatically
> boot from the second disk, then bios=81 would be the appropriate
> entry here. This is more common with SCSI bios than IDE bios. I
> simply plan on relocating the drive so it will replace the dead
> drive C: in the event of failure of the primary boot drive.
>
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Boot+Root+Raid+LILO-3.html
>
> That _seems_ to address the exact situation you speak of. I haven't
> tested this, but I might eventually get around to doing a test.
> (My systems currently use GRUB 0.9x, and my present intention is to
> migrate not back to LILO but rather to extlinux.)

G'day Rick,

Details are sketchy now as I made this change in 2005 after 9 good years
with LILO. I did try very hard to make it work, and it may have been an
issue with the BIOS ultimately. I actually had a hard copy of that
particular howto next to my console as I was constantly working with
LILO and RAID trying to get something that was reliable across the
plethora of nasty hardware I had to support, so if there was a tip in
there that might have applied I certainly would have tried it more than
once. Thankfully I've managed to repress most of those memories.

The fact remains once bitten, twice shy and it was *much* easier to get
Grub to work reliably than LILO in this particular instance. After
spending the couple of hours I needed to come up to speed on Grub, I
just saw no point persisting with LILO anymore. Under the circumstances
it was a more reliable solution. I've used Grub now on all x86 based
machines since 2005 and I've never bumped up against an issue that has
taken more than 5 minutes to resolve, and certainly nothing that wasn't
a fat finger issue rather than hardware doing funky stuff.

Horses for courses, I just find Grub reliable enough that I can't see a
point in moving away from it. If you read the docs it really does work,
even against pathological BIOS implementations that make LILO fragile.

I'm not rejecting your experience, I'm just saying *I* found a case
would reliably break LILO, and after learning how to actually configure
Grub I've never bumped up against anything similar. That's just me however.

I even migrated from Grub 0.9x to Grub2 and I've had nothing but
unicorns and rainbows there too. Again, another learning curve, but
nothing a couple of hours didn't sort out. I seem to be the only person
alive that actually gets along with Grub, but that's ok because it works
for *me* and that's what matters.