[NTLUG:Discuss] lilo vs grub

[Chris Cox]

Ralph Green, Jr wrote:
> Howdy,
>   It had looked like distros were all moving from lilo to grub in the
> last year or two.  Lately, it seems to be going back the other way.  I
> installed SuSE 9.1 two weeks ago on a laptop and Mandrake 10.1 on a
> desktop tonight.  They both installed lilo as the default bootloader. 
> Is there some reason that lilo is making a comeback?

Grub is probably still the "default", but for whatever reason, something
was seen on the disk/driver/etc. that made it choose LILO instead.

>   At the last meeting, I talked with someone in the LIP room and he said
> SuSE had installed grub for him.  So, there must be some characteristic
> of my system that made SuSE choose lilo.  It works fine.  I am just
> curious about what is going on and I have not found any useful
> references online.

Try writing nulls across the drive (wipe out the paritition table at
least) before installing SUSE and see if you get Grub.  You'll get
LILO with certain RAID controllers as well.