Multiple erronious entries in boot loader.

[et2paradigm]

I just finished a dual boot Mint 8 and Vista install on my HP Pavillion DV6768se laptop.
The first two times I tried to install I selected the import user from windows option which caused it to hang the install at 89%. The third time I tried selecting no on that option and the install went flawlessly, except for now I have three mint options in grub and two windows options plus two safe-mode options.
I know that only one of the Mint options will work (#dev9) so I want to get rid of #5 and #7 and I'd like to remove one of the windows options. While I'm at it I'd like to make windows the default O.S. if none is selected. All I can find in google is how to change the time, or add windows.

Any suggestions?

[Jay514]

In the terminal type = sudo update grub, it will ask for your password , then it should update the entries & correct the problem.
For selecting the default boot entry you can use the program StartUp-Manager & it can be found with Synaptic , or Adept. Just install it to your system & it gives you a lot of options for controlling the grub.Note =It does not work as well with grub2 & if you have grub 2 installed you may have to do other changes to get the desired results. Hope this helps.

[vincent]

Minor correction: it's "sudo update-grub". That extra dash makes all the difference to running the command successfully, because "update" isn't actually a command, and "grub" is most certainly not a flag.

With Grub 2, avoid using Startup Manager. Go to a terminal window and type:

Code: Select all

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Enter your password, and then you can edit the settings with the GEdit text editor.

This is what the first few lines of your grub file will look like:

Code: Select all

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
...

Change the "0" after GRUB_DEFAULT to correspond with the number of the OS you'd like to boot by default at startup. "0" refers to the 1st entry on the Grub bootloader's list, "1" refers to the 2nd, "2" refers to the 3rd and so on. While you're here, you may also be interested in "GRUB_TIMEOUT=2"; change "2" to any positive integer to tell Grub how many seconds to wait before automatically booting the default OS (default is "10", or 10 seconds). Remember to run "sudo update-grub" afterwards, like it says at the top of the Grub file. Sudo update-grub should also get rid of any redundant/invalid OS entries on your list.

[StanTheMan]

In Grub2 , the file /boot/grub/gruub.cfg has permissions Root=read (only).
Tot edit this file you have to change the permissions - -

cd /boot/grub
ls -l
sudo chmod u+w root grub.cfg

Now do your editing with Gedit or Nano .
After saving the changes , return the permissions

sudo chmod u-w grub.cfg

When editing grub.cfg , to hide a menuentry , add ' # ' ahead of ' menu entry '

#menuentry "Linux Mint 8 Helena x64, linux 2.6.31-14-generic (recovery mode)" {
recordfail=1
if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,7)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 6e7b8ced-08da-4243-8093-8ab53231489f
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=UUID=6e7b8ced-08da-4243-8093-8ab53231489f ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
}

[vincent]

I wouldn't recommend making changes directly in /boot/grub/grub.cfg, reason being that everytime you run "sudo update-grub" afterwards, those changes are going to be overwritten, and replacing them everytime can get bothersome. It's much better to make those changes directly in Grub's config files, and run update-grub to put those changes in effect.

[subcook]

So,

If I wanted to add plpinstc.com ( PloP bootloader installer) to ( what I normally would do - menu.lst, I would change the " load kernel line from kernel /boot/vmlinuz.etc to kernel boot/plpinstc.com). I did change the permissions to the grub.cfg file, but its not letting me save it. Is there a specific grub config file that someone can refer me to for this???


thanks in advance



-cheers