On Monday 27 October 2003 23:07, Charles Curley wrote: > Is there any way to detect which boot loader is the working one? > Simply detecting whether a grub or lilo package is installed may not > be sufficient, especially in the case where both are installed. I > suppose I could look to see which is more recent, grub.conf or > lilo.conf, but I can think of several scenarios unde which this would > fail. > > It's time to update my bare metal recovery scripts > (http://www.charlescurley.com/Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWT >O.html) to handle grub, and I'd like to detect the current boot loader > if possible. Would this method be of any use? Use "dd" to read the MBR, assuming that's where your boot loader resides. I know that the word "GRUB" will appear; for example: #dd ibs=512 count=1 if=/dev/hda | grep -i grub Binary file (standard input) matches Someone else will have to pipe up about LILO though... Regards, Mike Klinke
