ditching grub

Mainly due to ignorance, I've ditched grub on this laptop and am going with lilo.

Long ago I partitioned my hard drive into swap, a 6GB partition (/dev/hda4) for the OS, and two (/dev/hda5, /dev/hda6) very large partitions for data. At one point I needed to switch from one distribution to another, so I installed Ubuntu alternative on one of the large partitions. Ubuntu uses grub by default. And I wanted to switch root partitions from /dev/hda5 to /dev/hda4.

I just couldn't figure out what the right magic was for getting grub to switch. I created a small /boot partition and copied the /boot from /dev/hda5 to there (/dev/hda2). But I couldn't figure out how to get the menu.lst in /dev/hda2 to be applied onto the MBR of the whole drive. After a few days of trying (desultorily, this wasn't a big deal at all) I finally found a way to corrupt the MBR so that finally I couldn't boot into Ubuntu at all. So I whipped out the trusty rescue CD (ubuntu alternative installer) and finally just edit /etc/lilo on /dev/hda4 to point at the right kernel, ran lilo, and voila, everything is good.

No doubt that could have been done with grub too. But I've always used lilo and i've only stuck with grub because I thought that everyone says grub is so much better, there must be some reason to that.

For my own use, however, I don't see any advantage go grub. Long ago, lilo had problems with large partitions. Those have been fixed though. Possibly, grub has a better interface, but I can't benefit from that advantage since I can't see it. Lilo does everything I need it to do, I already know what to do. It's a great tool for rescuing borked MBRs (booting into linux, anyway). From now on, I'm uninstalling grub from all my Ubuntu installations and installing lilo. If I have to manage /etc/lilo.conf, well, that's no big deal. I already know how to do that, and I know how to fix things when I do the wrogn thing.