Ubuntu Installation :: Grub2: No Way To Update The Boot Menu?
Jun 25, 2010
I upgraded my main box to Ubuntu 10.04 and everything runs fine, except for a problem with grub: I can't modify the boot menu in any way, I'm stuck with what grub2 thought was the optimal setup at installation time (and it got it wrong, btw). The current boot menu lists:
- my older 9.10 install in sdb2 (one kernel)
- legacy windows XP install on sda1
- my even older 9.04 install in sdb1 (two kernel versions)
- my new install in sdb3, with only one kernel (the one coming with the distro CD)
I tried anything I could think of to modify this menu:
- modify the /etc grub config file then running sudo update-grub
- using a specific app (system manager? don't remember its name)
- upgrading to the latest kernel
- removing and reinstalling grub
to no avail: the menu is still there in the above form, and I have to manually select the 10.04 (old) kernel by hand every time I reboot.
I'd like have some text written on my grub2 boot menu.
In legacy grub you could just add: title Foobar and you'd get "Foobar" displayed.
I tried: menuitem "Foobar" {} grub2, but it doesn't work. Any ideas how do you do something like that?
(Yes, I know writing grub.cfg by hand is not very smart. But I have a special situation: I wrote my own grub.cfg on a dedicated boot partition from where I chainload to other grub on other partitions. Those secondary grubs generate their grub.cfgs on the fly, so everything is OK )
I have Ubuntu 9.10, PuppyLinux431 and Windows XP on a Toshiba laptop. I like Ubuntu, but the speed of PuppyLinux is addictive, so that was my default boot until I upgraded Ubuntu which included an upgrade to Grub2.
My problem: Grub2 doesn't recognise PuppyLinux. Using information from [url] I have made an executable file named 07_Puppy in /etc/grub.d and did update-grub from root. Still no luck. I can boot PuppyLinux from the grub command line using the following commands:
Just before grub displays the boot menu, I think I see a very brief message about a syntax error, but it's gone before I can read it.
Here is the contents of my grub.cfg:
Quote:
Why Grub2 doesn't see Puppy and let me boot it from the menu?
I have two hard drives - (1) 80GB (2) 500GB: the 1st HD has 3 partitions (in that order) - Windows 7, Ubuntu 10.10 & Swap. the 2nd HD is for storage only, and has 2 partitions.
I did the following - I installed Windows 7 on the first partition of the 1st HD, it booted just fine. Then I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on the second partition of the 1st HD.
Windows 7 shows in the GRUB menu alongside with Ubuntu. Ubuntu boots just fine, but when I select Windows it simply restarts the computer and the GRUB menu shows again.
RESULTS.txt of Boot Info Script:
Code: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== => Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive in partition #3 for (,msdos3)/boot/grub.
machine boots straight to Windows, Grub2 does not display the normal boot menu choices. Therefore, not able to boot into Ubuntu 9.10.Perhaps someone could look at this Results.txt file and shed some light on what went wrong.This machine was working fine for a long time, then all of a sudden, it starting booting straight to Windows.
i wiped my entire hard drive that had xp as its only OS. I freshly installed a Windows 7 ultimate and everything went perfectly. I then decided to install 10.4. I split the partitions correctly (i had experience doing this already with my laptop, which has xp/10.4). Ubuntu 10.4 install went flawlessly, except for one thing. Now when i boot up the pc, it goes straight into 10.4. I have tried holding shift during the start up to force the boot menu, and it just shows the Ubuntu 10.4 OS as choices. Any clue what i could do to make Win7 appear in the boot menu?
I'm having an odd dual-boot problem. Briefly, I can't boot Windows XP from its entry on the GRUB2 menu. If I set the disk order in BIOS so that the machine boots off the drive with Windows XP, XP starts normally. However, if I boot off the Ubuntu drive, which brings up the GRUB2 menu, choosing the "Windows 7 loader" option (why it says Windows 7 when there's only Windows XP is another question!) just makes my system reboot.
It appears there's some problem with the way GRUB2 attempts to start Windows XP. I'm also wondering why GRUB2 thinks it sees the Windows 7 loader. There shouldn't be any Windows 7 anything anywhere. I once had a Windows 7 RC install on the same disk as Windows XP, but I wiped the Windows 7 system partition and reallocated its space as just another NTFS partition. FWIW, GRUB2 is installed on the MBR of the disk containing my Ubuntu install. Windows XP has a different drive all to itself.
As a long time Red Hat/Fedora user, I'm quite new to the Ubuntu/Debian culture, and/or, to the Grub2 specific behavior.I'd like to see Grub2 system selection menu at every boot time even if I only have a single operating system, Ubuntu 9.10, on my hard drive. What should I do fot this purpose?
After upgrading to 10.10 the grub boot menu stopped showing up. I made a custom menu in grub.d and update grub finds everything, but when I restart my system the boot menu never shows. I should have two kernels. How do I get the boot menu to show every time I restart my system?
When I first boot up. I get the GRUB command line. What happened to the boot menu? And I can boot up into my Windows partition just fine. But when I try the other partitions i get "Unknown file system" or when I try to boot into the other ntfs drive, I get "BOOTMBR missing", but yet it does not mean Windows, because i can boot that just fine. I can't find my Ubuntu partition. How can I get the GRUB boot menu back?
i initilally installed ubuntu 9.10 then installed windows 7 ,then i recovered grub2 using livecd as told in the post [URL] i did "sudo update-grub" and got windows 7 menu entry but when i select that entry windows 7 does not load but the grub2 is reloaded again. i cant boot to windows 7.
Windows 7 have 100 mb partition "System Reserved" the grub2 points to that partition but still windows 7 not loaded.
sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x3c3a81f5
I went through so many post but I haven't found the proper answer yet hope you have an Idea1. Grub2 saves only Linux OS as last selected no Windows OS2.It is possible to boot into a cdrom (drive)?
Have recently installed 10.10 and have several other OS' installed, as well as other NTFS (non-OS) partitions. After a couple of updates, my boot menu shows about 8 entries, whereas I should only have about 4... How is this fixed in Grub2?
Have installed Startup Manager, and there seems to be no option here...
I've already read and tested the various guides for pasword portecting the menu items. What I need is a little bit different. I need to protect the whole boot menu so normal users cannot select any entry at all and only let the default entry boot.
I just installed Debian squeeze. I installed grub to the MBR. It uses Grub 2. Apparently I'm not supposed to edit /boot/grub/grub.cnf, but /etc/default/grub and /etc/grub.d. I looked at these and read The Readme as well as a tutorial at [URL]. I'm still not sure of what to do. When I boot up I get 4 choices: 2 for Squeeze and two for another linux distro. I would like to edit the print out I get when I boot up, as well as add the partition for XP which wasn't included.
This is /etc/default/grub: # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. GRUB_DEFAULT=2 GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" .....
Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic (recovery mode) Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic (recovery mode)
Q1) I only really need the latest kernel, 2.6.31-19, don't I?
Q2) So how can I get rid of the two 2.6.31-14 entries?
I could not seem to find any documentation on how to chage the X anf y coordinated of the grub 2 menu in order to place it in a differrent location on the screen and change is its size (not resolution), remove border.
I want to install more than on linux distribution on one computer (and the computer has Windows XP, too). How do you make a master grub2 installation that is in its own partition and that has entries that chainload different linux distributions that may have grub2 or grub?
I have Koala with Grub 2, working fine. Just did some updates and now the boot menu is getting long, too many kernels. Want to reduce to the last two kernels plus Win XP, so got online and looked for instructions in English. News flash: Nobody seems to care about this issue, there is absolutely nothing to be found on it for Grub 2. There is a SIMPLE command for Grub, "howmany", in menulst. Menulst is not used in Grub 2, so that's out. OK I give up, after searching for over an hour for Grub 2's equivalent. Maybe someone here knows how it's done? IN ENGLISH please, not "sudo I am an intelligent BEGINNER. The Grub 2 page says: "GRUB 2 allows users to create customized menu selections which will be automatically added to the main menu when sudo update-grub is executed." Note the word ADDED. What about REMOVING? Does anyone want to bother themselves with addressing this issue? I read somewhere StartUpManager can do this. Application Finder doesn't show StartUpManager on my machine, and reading about it at [URL].. as it seems to be Grub-1 related. I don't get the impression it will do what I want for Grub 2. If it does, they should say so, right??
I could remove the older kernels, but would rather just edit the boot menu. I found this for removing kernels: Open synaptic, do a search for "linux-image" and then remove the older kernels from your computer. Removing them via synaptic will remove them from the boot menu as well. Keep the kernel you are currently using plus one older one you know works. To find your current kernel: uname -r OK so I open synaptic and do the search. It comes up with maybe 200 files, some of which start with linux-image, scattered throughout the list. Oh boy, let a newbie loose on this. Just select and delete them all, why not? I can't tell one from another, the only difference is a cryptic number that means not one whit to me. There has to be a better way!
I got brave after editing etc/default/grub and doing update-grub, which reported the kernels by number, which I had forgotten. Then went back into Synaptic and hit the 'Sort By Installed' divider, which brought all the installed kernels to the top, where they make sense. Then I selected the two lowest-numbered and shot them in the head. They are gone.
i have been running Kubuntu 10.04 on my primary hard drive, and i have a second 1.5TB HD that i use for storage. so shrunk the secondary HD partition and created a second 50GB partition and i installed Ubuntu 10.10 on it and told it to rewrite the mbr on my primary HD. Where i am at: i took the menu entry from my Kubuntu "grub.cfg" and the entry from my Ubuntu "grub.cfg" and put them in the 40_custom file. so now when i boot-up my computer, it shows both installations at the bottom of Grub2s menu list. with all the menu entries that Grub automatically adds.
What i would like to know is how do i make it so that the Grub2 menu only shows the entries that i add to the 40_Custom file and not the randomly generated list aswell.
how I can setup the grub2 menu so that it does not timeout? What do I need to set in the configuration file? I did it once before on my old computer but forget now what I changed.
I installed Win7 on a 2-disk RAID0 fakeraid. I then unplugged those drives and installed linux mint on a separate drive. I did it this way because if I left the drives plugged in, linux would jack up the fakeraid for those drives and make windows upbootable, and installing linux to the fakeraid itself is just too much of a PITA. So basically, this is the disk configuration, and there's no chance of me changing it.
Right now, I can boot into either win7 or mint by pressing F12 for the boot menu, and then selecting the drive the os is installed on. It would be nice if I could just add an entry to the grub menu for win7. I've used the menu.lst file before, but apparently all that has changed with grub2. I've checked out some of the grub2 docs and poked around in /etc/grub.d, but frankly, it seems to be orders of magnitude more complicated than it should be.
GRUB2 does not show Windows-XP Pro in the menu anymore.
Probably already posted before; however each case usually is somehow different. I use Ubuntu only occasionally to learn how it works.
After the latest update using Update Manager, quite a few packages were installed without any problem. However GRUB2 does not show the Windows-XP(Prof) partition in the menu anymore. Now I can't boot Windows because I can't select what is not shown.
1. This what I get with command "sudo fdisk -l" (in the present situation)
georges@PC1:~$ sudo fdisk -l [sudo] password for georges: Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
[Code]....
It is already the second time that GRUB2 changes the menu items as it pleases, messing up the bootmenu. How can I repair the bootmenu in order to be able to boot Windows-XP, as before the updates ?
The current Ubuntu version is now 10.4 LTS The current GRUB version is "GNU GRUB version 1.98 Ubuntu10"
I recently upgraded grub -> grub2 on my karmic box. Grub2 worked when chainloaded from legacy grub, and also the first time I tried it standalone. Both times the grub2 menu came up.
I ran vbeinfo at a grub2 command prompt, and found my monitor's native res listed - 1280x1024. I added that to my /etc/defaults/grub and then ran update-grub, and rebooted. This time no menu appeared and the default entry booted straight away. I suspected that the resolution was not supported for some reason or that the way I entered it in the config file was wrong, so I commented it out again in /etc/default/grub, and ran update-grub again - to no avail.
I have since tried lots of different formats for the GRUB_GFXMODE, such as 1280x1024@24, 1280x1024x24, and the normal 640x480, but none of them give me a grub menu. I have even tried using GRUB_TERMINAL=console, to no avail. I have checked the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file each time to make sure my changes were put there correctly by update-grub. I have also made sure that timeout was set to 10, and the hidden timeout was set to 0. My GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet".
I have reinstalled grub2, grub-pc, and grub-common, and I have dpkg-reconfigured them all too. I have no idea what to do to get my grub menu showing up again.
but i really really new in ubuntu (linux), i just finished installing my ubuntu 10.10 desktop edition. after restart for the first time i can see my windows xp and windows 7 os were in the menu list but not my msdos 6.22 with fat 16 partition. I try to edit grub.cfg to add but i am not sure what the command line should i use in menu entry, could someone give an example. I really need that since i still make a programming project using C++ dos and Clipper.
I've just installed FreeBSD 8.1 on /dev/sda4 (FreeBSD slice), without installing the boot loader from FreeBSD (I've selected None when prompted for boot loader in sysinstall). Now I want to use my existing Grub2 from already installed Ubuntu 10.10 to boot FreeBSD also.
After some reading, I've added to the end of /etc/grub.d/40_custom:
After running sudo update-grub, grup.cfg file shows my new entry. The problem is that after restart, I don't see the new entry in the grub menu.
Another question, If i used chainloader +1, that means I need to have the FreeBSD bootloader installed also on /dev/sda4 right? For chainloading booloaders?
I didn't get to that step, I first want to see the entry in the menu.
Any idea what I might be missing/misdoing? (I also checked for blank spaces in the menuentry like the wiki for grub2 says)
Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 from 10.10 I noticed that my Grub menu had not upgraded. The upgrade was not as straight forward as it should have been as the PC hung at the end of the installation resulting in a reboot and running dpkg in safe mode to get it all back up and running.
To fix the incorrect grub menu.lst file which was not updating, I renamed the original file and then ran sudo update-grub. It generated a new and correct file. However, my Windows partition was not listed as a Grub menu option.
I tend to update stuff slower than most - I'm still using Hardy and I probably won't upgrade to Lucid until June-ish. I wanted to test drive GRUB2 so I upgraded following instructions here:When I chainloaded GRUB2, I got a menu that only contained Ubuntu; my Windows Vista bootloader entry had disappeared. I couldn't find a sample "40_custom" entry to modify when I tried to create an entry for Vista myself. Had no problem booting into Ubuntu and I could still boot Vista from the old menu. Spent about 20 minutes on it, then I gave up and reinstalled legacy GRUB.
