Two boot menus - why?

[Evil Overlord]

Dual boot W7 Pro 32 & Mint 14 Cinnamon 32
Lenovo X201s

I created a dual boot (fresh W7, fresh Mint) following these instructions:
http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/06/06/ho ... ndows-7/2/

Everything worked fine (once I set the delay >0 seconds)
However... Now I have two boot menus.
1. Choose between W7 and Mint
2. After I choose Mint, another long set of selections comes up. I haven't had time to read the whole thing, but it seems the first choice is Mint, then Mint recover, then x, y, z, and finally Windows 7.

I'm guessing this is a boot menu that the Mint installer created in my Mint Boot partition. How can I get rid of it and go straight into Mint after the selection in the first menu?

[karlchen]

Hello, Evil Overlord.

I'm guessing this is a boot menu that the Mint installer created in my Mint Boot partition. How can I get rid of it and go straight into Mint after the selection in the first menu?

What you see is the Linux Mint Grub boot menu. You cannot and do not want to get rid of it. If you do your Mint will not boot any longer.
What you can do is reducing the display timeout from 10 seconds (default) to 0.
Inside Mint edit the file /etc/default/grub with root privileges.

Code: Select all

gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

Reduce the 10 seconds' timout variable to 0.
Save the change and quit gedit.
Next run

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

Kind regards,
Karl

[Dngrsone]

That's an ugly way of doing things...

You have a choice of using either the Windows Bootloader or Grub.

I have gone both ways in various installations over the years, and since I am primarily a Linux guy now, I prefer using Grub, if only because installing new Linux distributions is easier once the inital setup is done.

First, you want to back up all of your data. Put it in a safe place, on a separate storage device. If you have the time and resources, I'd recommend making two backups, one to a remote drive and the other to optical media such as DVD-R.

You will want to have a WIndows Recovery disc available to use that is compatible with your current Windows Operating System.

If you decide to use the Grub 2 bootloader, then installation deviates from the advice on your link this way-- let the installer put the boot menu on /dev/sda. This will break your Windows boot, but to fix that, you will want to boot up your recovery disc, go to terminal and enter the following two commands in order:

bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /fixmbr

That should fix your Windows install, and any time you reinstall a Linux package, the new package will install is Grub over the existing one, detect all your Operating Systems and everything will be hunky-dory.

If you prefer to use the WIndows Bootloader instead, there is a way to do that, as well... I seem to have last done this in 2005, so the methods may be entirely different now, and my way requires patience and a degree of comfort with command-lines, but here's a record of my attempt using Win XP and Slackware: http://www.devhardware.com/forums/opera ... 66256.html

[Evil Overlord]

Thanks to both. I'll go with setting the delay to 0. Not as elegant, but lots easier, and until I get my wireless issues sorted out (viewtopic.php?f=53&t=118536), I'm not confident Linux will see much use.