In order to stop LILO from being invoked when the system boots, its
boot sector has to be either removed or disabled. All other files belonging
to LILO can be deleted after removing the boot sector,
if desired.
Again, when removing Linux, LILO must be de-installed before (!) its files ( /boot, etc.) are deleted. This is especially important if LILO is operating as the MBR.
LILO 0.14 (and newer) can be de-installed with lilo -u". If LILO 0.14
or newer is currently installed, but the first version of LILO installed was
older than 0.14,
lilo -U" may work. When using
-U", the warning
at the end of this section applies.
If LILO 's boot sector has been installed on a primary partition and is booted by the ``standard'' MBR or some partition switcher program, it can be disabled by making a different partition active. MS-DOS' FDISK, Linux fdisk or LILO 's activate can do that.
If LILO 's boot sector is the master boot record (MBR) of a disk, it has
to be replaced with a different MBR, typically MS-DOS' ``standard'' MBR.
When using MS-DOS 5.0 or above, the MS-DOS MBR can be restored with
FDISK /MBR". This only alters the boot loader code, not the
partition table.
LILO automatically makes backup copies when it overwrites boot sectors.
They are named /boot/boot. nnnn, with nnnn
corresponding to the device number, e.g. 0300 is /dev/hda,
0800 is /dev/sda, etc. Those backups can be used to restore
the old MBR if no easier method is available. The commands are
dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 or
dd if=/boot/boot.0800 of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1
respectively.
WARNING: Some Linux distributions install boot. nnnn files from the system where the distribution was created. Using those files may yield unpredictable results. Therefore, the file creation date should be carefully checked.