difference between Grub and LILO

[bilal_jan]

i want to know what is the difference between GRUB and LILO boot Loader.

[devils casper]

GRUB is much better and user friendly boot loader than Lilo. Most of distros are using GRUB these days and GRUB Development Team is working on GRUB 2, a much better and advanced boot loader.

Lilo has a few limitations. It doesn't have interactive mode and network boot up support.

[bilal_jan]

but i have read that GRUB is used by RedHat and LILO is used by other distributers.
can u make this clear!!!!
Thanks

[daark.child]

The text you used as reference is probably old. Red Hat was one of the first distros to switch entirely from LILO to GRUB, but that was several years ago (I think it was in the Red Hat 8 release in 2002). For the last 5 or so years, there has been a big shift towards using GRUB as the default bootloader. Apart from Slackware and a few other distros, GRUB is now the default bootloader for the majority of Linux distros out there.

[i92guboj]

but i have read that GRUB is used by RedHat and LILO is used by other distributers.
can u make this clear!!!!
Thanks

There's nothing else to say. Grub is more featurefull, and it doesn't require reinstalling the bootloader each time you install a new kernel, which is one of the most idiotic annoyances of lilo. And if you have some problem, you are bound to a livecd because lilo can make your system unbootable.

[valan]

There's a problem with grub: it's slow to update. E2fsprogs updated recently, and it's new default is to use 256 bit inodes. This is not a problem, the problem is that grub hasn't yet updated to be able to support 256 bit inodes, so unless you are aware of this situation, or have a patched grub, you won't be able to boot your new ext3 filesystem. More info and patch from here:
#463123 - e2fsprogs: grub 0.97 cannot boot ext3 filesystems with an inode size of 256 byte - Debian Bug report logs