FreeOS.com: An in-depth look at LILO

[ Thanks to Trevor
Warren for this link. ]

“In a previous article, we saw how versatile the boot loader
‘LILO’ was. This session we get more technical and look at the
internals of LILO, its primary boot time operation, functionality
and a few nifty little arguments that can help us tune up our LILO
installation. One of the plus points of LILO is that it is
filesystem independent. It is able to boot operating systems from
Microsoft, OS/2, SCO Unix, Unixware, PC-DOS to Linux.”

“LILO has the capability to handle a maximum of 16 different
boot images. Not only can LILO be used as the primary boot manager,
with LILO written onto the MBR, but also as a secondary boot loader
with LILO written to the boot sector of an extended partition.
There are a whole series of permutations and combinations to
booting into their system, using LILO. So, LILO should be able to
boot your system regardless of the configuration.”

“Let’s take a general look at how a booting procedure really
goes about. Data on our hard drives is laid out in a very precise
and accurate manner and structured into “Tracks” and “Sectors”.
“Tracks” and “Sectors” are the fundamental locks that define the
storage of data on the storage media. Consider a storage device
like a hard drive. This hard drive on formatting consists of
various tracks and sectors.”

Complete
Story