LILO can also take over the entire boot procedure. If installed as the MBR,
LILO is responsible for either booting Linux or any other OS. This approach
has the disadvantage, that the old MBR is overwritten and has to be restored
(either from a backup copy, with FDISK /MBR" on recent versions of
MS-DOS or by overwriting it with something like BOOTACTV) if Linux
should ever be removed from the system.
You should verify that LILO is able to boot your other operating system(s) before relying on this method.
Installation:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/fd/MBR bs=512 count=1"
Deinstallation:
dd if=/fd/MBR of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1"
If you've installed LILO as the master boot record, you have to
explicitly specify the boot sector (configuration variable boot=)
when updating the map. Otherwise, it
will try to use the boot sector of your current root partition, which
may even work, but will probably leave your system unbootable.