RE: [SLE] Boot Loaders

On Apr 4, 2005 @4:49 PM, John Scott wrote:

On Apr 1, 2005 7:06 PM, Greg Wallace wrote:

...

I recently purchased system backup software from a company called Storix. One of its options is to create an entire system backup. You also create a CD that can be used to boot a bare bones linux system up from which you can

run

...

the full restore against that hard drive backup (i. e., it functions like you were using your SuSE Installation CD to "boot current system). It even allows you to make certain configuration changes during the installation. All this seems well and good and I have created a backup and a boot CD and ran it up to the point of pulling the trigger for a re-install. There is, however, one slight quirk. The current version of this software does not support GRUB (a new release coming out this summer will). So, at least as far as I can ascertain, when you restore from a backup, you are then automatically converted to LILO. The Storix support people told me that if I wanted to switch back to GRUB after a re-install, and assuming I had done a pure re-install (no tweaks to the partitioning, etc.) from the backup I had done, all I would have to do to get GRUB back would be to run the standard GRUB utility and have it re-write my MBR. At that point, according to them, I would be exactly back to where I started before the backup except I would have some new LILO information on my disk. This sounds reasonable to me, assuming the LILO installation didn't re-name or otherwise change any of the other settings on my system that would then make it incompatible with GRUB. However, I'm not at all knowledgeable in this area and wanted to run this by some of you guys who are more familiar with the boot process to make sure what they are saying is correct. Does anyone see any problems with what they are telling me?

Thanks, Greg Wallace

Stormix is replacing GRUB with LILO as your bootloader. Not a problem. If you decide to restore from the backup, just rerun the grub installer and it will rewrite the bootloader into the MBR. Read the man page on grub so you'll know the command line parameters. Even if you don't reinstall the GRUB bootloader, LILO can boot SuSE after you restore.

John

Thanks John. That's basically what their help desk said, but I wanted to get some confirmation from the list. I want to upgrade my old 8.1 SuSE to the latest version and I want to use this software for backup once I get there. The next release of their software, with GRUB, is due out this summer, but they don't say when (June? August?). I really don't want to wait that long. I like GRUB and want to stay with it, so I'll want to convert back once I test their recovery to make sure it brought back everything else in working order. Of course, if I foul up my system when I re-install GRUB I could always go back to my last 8.1 backup, but that's a lot of effort due to a number of factors, not to mention the fact that I'm now on an unsupported version of SuSE and need to get this done. Greg W