identifying boot loader

[Mandosa]

is there a way to determine if a system has grub or lilo as the boot loader from the linux OS prompt.

[Stuart Browne]

Sure.

ls -l /etc/{lilo,grub}.conf

you'll only have one.

[Gopi Sekar]

just a little risky method:

strings | less

eg: strings /dev/hda | less

the first few lines should have either GRUB or LILO on it.

Note: You have to run it as root user and the give the device name or partition name where bootloader is written.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Mandosa]

seems i have both a grub.conf and lilo.conf. both have been the default loader @ some point on this system.
What risky about the strings method (this is a producation server)

thx

[Gopi Sekar]

not much if you are doing it carefully. strings will just read the hard disk and pipe it to less.

as long as you are not trying to write to it, then it is safe. Before typing the reply to you, i tried it on my one and only desktop which has every data of mine and till now it is working fine.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Bill Thorsteinson · Accepted solution]

As root try the commands:

lilo -v

and

grub -v

One of them should be not found. If you
have both, it will take some more work
to determine which loader is being used.
If the MBR is used then the command

dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 | strings

The output will include either GRUB or LILO
if they are install in the master boot
record. If not use fdisk or cfdisk to
find the bootable partition and try the
above command replacing /dev/hda with
the bootable partion.