Grand and Unified

We’re wrapping up with Grub today. It is, indeed, a GRand Unified Bootloader. I like its flexibility and the fact that you can make changes on the fly. However, as always, there are just a few things to watch for when configuring Grub.

The first thing, really, is a tweak. If you’re just not big on the graphical approach in a bootloader, you can comment out the splashimage line in /etc/grub.conf. To do so, insert a semi-colon (;) at the beginning of the line. That will put you back to a text-based screen during boot.

Second, make sure you have your partition specifications right in grub.conf. That means right in Grub’s terminology. Grub actually uses the drive specifications found in your system’s BIOS. Remember, above all else, that zero is significant. That means that the first ide hard drive will be recognized by Grub as hd0, rather than the /dev/hda convention we’re so used to seeing. The documentation on the Gnu project site goes into further details on how Grub identifies partitions.

If you’re dual-booting with a Win system and decide you want to remove Grub, you’ll need to do an fdisk /mbr with your Windows utility disk, boot back into Linux with your Linux boot disk, and re-commit Lilo. That will assure that Grub is removed. This does, however, have the potential to hose your system, so use fdisk /mbr with caution.

Overall, Grub is powerful and useful. It does, indeed, look to be the next generation boot loader.