From ArchWiki

This article is a stub. It may be confusing, not contain enough information, or be a placeholder for an article to come. People are invited to expand it to full article status and remove this box.

The LInux LOader, or LILO for short, is a still widely used multiboot boot loader for Linux systems. It has been around for several years, but is phased out slowly thanks to the advent of the alternative boot loader GRUB, which offers easier configuration and is less prone to leaving a system unbootable.

LILO is configured by editing the /etc/lilo.conf file and running lilo afterwards to apply the new configuration. If you chose to use LILO during the Arch Linux installation process, the configuration file should be setup already just fine.

More help on setting up LILO can be found in the LILO-mini-HOWTO.

Arch uses GRUB by default, but this is easy to change.

[edit] Notes

Note that you have to run lilo as root everytime you do a kernel upgrade, otherwise the system is likely to be rendered unbootable.

If lilo is really slow loading the bzImage try to add 'compact' (without quotes) in the /etc/lilo.conf file global section.

[edit] Sample

#
# /etc/lilo.conf
#

boot=/dev/hda
# This line often fixes L40 errors on bootup
# disk=/dev/hda bios=0x80

default=Arch
timeout=100
lba32
prompt

image=/boot/vmlinuz26
        label=Arch
	append="devfs=nomount"
	vga=788
        root=/dev/hda2
        read-only

image=/boot/vmlinuz26
        label=ArchRescue
        root=/dev/hda8
        read-only

other=/dev/hda1
        label=Windows

# End of file