On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 10:05:12PM +0200, karl@??? wrote:
> Rick Moen:
> > Quoting karl@??? (karl@???):
> > > It does not care about MBR vs. GPT as long it can find the blocks where
> > > the kernel and possible initrd/initramfs is.
> > > I use Lilo on two GPT formatted disks where the partitions are mirrored
> > > and have no problems with it, remove any disk, still boots.
> > That makes sense. Thanks.
>
> Though, there might be a problem if one disk is damaged but visible for
> the bios and the bios don't try the "next" disk when the first fails.
> But that problem is probably the same for all bootloaders.
>
> Next scenario is if you have the bootloader on a different media, say
> e.g. a floppy. Then, will lilo load the kernel from disk 2 when disk 1
> fails (assuming mirrored /boot) ? Do grub handle that ?

I boot from a floppy.

boot=/dev/fd0

And for root I specify

root = "UUID=9ce657a4-6b9b-4aa3-8d46-8977164db98a"

SO if one hard drive of my RAID1 fails it still recogizes the other.
I use the older protocol for marking RAIDs that puts the RAID
signature at the end of the partition instead of the start, so that
LILO doesn't have to know about it.

My devuan stanza reads

image=/boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amd64
        label=devuanjessie
        read-only
#       restricted
#       alias=1
        initrd=/boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-amd64
        root=/dev/mapper/VG1-jessie--root

presumably overriding the root I specified before.

I suspect I can remove one of the root= specifications. Actuaally,
if the one from the devuanjessie stanza overrides the one specified
earlier, I probably don't need to use the UUID at all.

The noce thing about booting from a floppy is that I can have a whole
shelf of boot records to choose from, and if I screw one up, I have
another.

In case of disaster, I also have grub installed. But if I have that
kind of disaster, I may discover that it has not tested it recently
and therefor its broken.

Is there a way to tell lilo to boot from a hard disk with grub on it?
Is there a way to tell grub to boot from a lilo installation?

-- hendrik