Newbie questions

[mss]

Hi
I have a couple of newbie questions:

1) what is the diff between hd0 and hda or hda1

2) what is the diff between lilo and grub since they both muliboot? is one better than the other?

3) in my grub folder I see files such as stage1, xfs_stage1_5, minix_stage1_5 etc. what are these for?

Thanks

[techieMoe]

Hi
I have a couple of newbie questions:

1) what is the diff between hd0 and hda or hda1

Generally a name like /dev/hda is the name of a harddrive in the first IDE slot (/dev/hdb would be second, /dev/hdc third, etc). A name like /dev/hda1 is pointing to the first partition of that device.

2) what is the diff between lilo and grub since they both muliboot? is one better than the other?

"Better" is relative. There are benefits to either one. Lilo for instance lets you verify that your bootloader configuration is correct before you reboot, potentially saving you some headaches if you misspell things. The configuration file for LILO makes more sense to me personally, as well.

GRUB on the other hand can handle spaces in the names of your boot options as well as giving you real-time editing of your boot parameters, so if you screw something up you're not necessarily just out of luck. Most distributions these days offer the option of both, but the default for the ones I use is usually GRUB.

[craigevil]

Google is your friend.

GNU GRUB Manual 0.97
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

The Linux Documentation Project
http://www.tldp.org/