> On Tuesday 28 October 2003 20:06, Charles Curley wrote: > I've had an interruption in my email service and don't have individual > email responses here to which to reply. Fortunately, I can read the > archive and will try to respond here. > > Mike Klinke <lsomike futzin com> > > > 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 > > It will tell you if grub has been used, not necessarily if it is the > current boot loader. I tried that on my test system and found both the > keywords LILO and GRUB in its MBR (they are in two different places in > the MBR). I have not yet tried re-running lilo on that system to see > if lilo will clobber the GRUB keyword. But I know that grub does not > clobber the LILO keyword. detecting presence of grub in MBR: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2003-01/msg00062.html http://www.singlix.com/trdos/MBR.txt could also help I think... | --- cut --- | Where stuff is: | | The MBR program code starts at offset 0000. | The MBR messages start at offset 008b. | The partition table starts at offset 00be. | The signature is at offset 00fe. | --- cut --- I think the first, third and last offsets can be trusted and "The MBR messages" are unsafe to use. Probably a "collection" of code parts can help a program guess which boot loader is installed... I don't think grub/lilo/other do change their MBR code too frequently. <joke>You can even include virus detection code in that collection ;)))</joke> http://www.bsdg.org/swag/DRIVES/0099.PAS.html http://linux.tuwien.ac.at/fwiso/CD-Inhalt/usr/sbin/detectloader this one looks like boot loader detection code to me :) It will not be an easy task to find the actual boot loader for the active distro easy if you have for example some bootloader in MBR, LILO in /dev/hda1, GRUB in /dev/hda2 and OTHER in /dev/hda3. Probably looking which partition is mounted as /boot in such scenario can help but I'm not 101% sure. Hmm... interesting problem to solve :) I'm interested and would like to help if I can ;) > > "Doncho N. Gunchev" <mr700 globalnet bg> > > > ... and... maybe, this can be solved for fedora by simply putting an > > /etc/bootloader.conf with a single line bootloader="whatever" > > ;)... just an idea ;) > > That would solve it for Fedora, but won't help non-fedora users. Also, > what if the user switches to a different boot loader? The new boot > loader would have to know to over-write bootloader.conf. true, true :((( too sad but true :(((, fedora can still have /etc/bootloader.conf or /etc/sysconfig/bootloader, but this does not generaly solve the problem... -- Regards, Doncho N. Gunchev
