Working With The GRUB Menu

Posted by suvi under Linux, Tricks, Ubuntu

This tutorial describes how to edit the GRUB menu. It will also show how to add operating systems and how to add splash screens.

What everything means

To start off I will go over why you would use GRUB and what it all means.

The reason anyone would use the GRUB menu is to dual-boot two
different operating systems. All it is is a simple DOS menu that you
select which operating system you want to load during boot-up.

To open it type -

gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

This will open up the menu.lst (the file in which you edit the GRUB Menu) in a simple text editor while giving you the ability to make changes and save them.

You will see a bunch of lines at first that all begin with "#". That
tells the file to skip over these lines when reading the file. Scroll
down into you stop seeing them.

Title - This is what is shown when the menu loads at boot up. Editing this will only change what is written on the screen.

Root - You likely have something along these lines "(hd0,1)".
"hd0" refers to the your hard drive while 1 points to the partition.
Note that for GRUB, partitions start at 0 and not 1. for example
0=Partition 1, 1=Partition 2 and so on.

Kernel -Pretty self-explanatory. This just is to ask what kernel version you would like to boot with.

Initrd - This is simple a temporary file system used by the kernel during a boot till the real file system can be mounted.

That is the basics of what all those lines mean.

Read more at HowtoForge 

 

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