Changing the boot order

[Joe San]

Guys,

How can I change the boot order in my Ubuntu and Windows 7 dual boot installation? I tried the following and the menu.lst seems not to be listed??

gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

[Joe San]

I messed up with my dual boot. I always had bad luck with dual boots...something or the other goes wrong. The Ubuntu installation went fine. Later I logged onto Windows and to my surprise I was not able to see any of my desktop icons. Don't know what is wrong. Tried to drag those icons to the desktop, but seems not to work.

I'm going to give that up and try using a Virtual Machine and install Ubuntu on that.

[Joe San]

Have anyone tried installing Ubuntu on a Virtual Machine?

[Peter Johnson]

I have dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop, works just fine. I have no idea why your desktop icons disappeared on you - dual booting has nothing to do with this. (I installed Win7 first, then shrunk my C: drive partition to free up 54G of space, and then installed Ubuntu giving it 50GB for '/' and 4GB for swap.)

I am running dual (quad?) boot on my desktop - Win7, Vista, XP, Ubuntu. The various OSes are spread out among a number of disks. Even that works fine.

I have also installed VMWare server on Win7 (on both the laptop and dsektop) and have various guest OSes installed including Ubuntu.

[Peter Johnson]

And to answer the original question, edit the menu.list file to reference the Windows 7 entry. There should be several entries in menu.lst - two entries for Unbuntu, and entry for memtest, and 'separator' entry, and then Win7. The default boot entry will be '0', change that to '4'. (You might have to adjust this if an Ubuntu kernel update has added more entries - just count the number of "title" entries.)

[Joe San]

I was not able to find that menu.lst under grub....really do not know why the heck was that.

But by the way....how was the system's performance with VMBoxware with Ubuntu on it?

[Joe San]

Peter Johnson wrote:I have dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop, works just fine. I have no idea why your desktop icons disappeared on you - dual booting has nothing to do with this. (I installed Win7 first, then shrunk my C: drive partition to free up 54G of space, and then installed Ubuntu giving it 50GB for '/' and 4GB for swap.)

I am running dual (quad?) boot on my desktop - Win7, Vista, XP, Ubuntu. The various OSes are spread out among a number of disks. Even that works fine.

I have also installed VMWare server on Win7 (on both the laptop and dsektop) and have various guest OSes installed including Ubuntu.

Even I did the same...installed Win 7 first and then Ubuntu 9.10. Anyways, can you provide me answers for the following questions:

(1) I was not able to find the menu.lst under /boot/grub/ Where else to find that?

(2) In case I succeed to locate the menu.lst, how do I go about to remove those unwanted entries (unwanted for me atleast) like entry for the memtest. I just want to retain two one for Ubuntu and the other for Windows....with Windows as the firts entry.

(3) I have 4 GB of RAM and would like to know if that would be ideal in case if I go for a VMBoxWare installation with Win 7 as the base OS. How good the performance of the system be?

[Peter Johnson]

1) It should be at /boot/grub/menu.lst. What files do you have in /boot/grub?

2) The grub boot menu entries are listed at the end of menu.lst. Each entry starts with a line that starts with "title" and ends with a blank line. The order that they appear in the file is the order that they appear in the boo menu. You can comment out (recommended) or delete (not recommended, unless you first back up the original file) the unwanted entries and rearrange them as desired. I leave mine ordered as they are and instead change the value of the "default" entry near the start of the file.

3) Well, it is no speed demon, you will definitely need more patience. But once the client OS gets warmed up, the responsiveness is not that bad. It works better on my desktop (quad core, with 2 CPUs allocated to the client OS), but not so great on my laptop (a slower dual core with only one CPU allocated to the client OS). Note that these experiences are with VMWare Server 2, and not with VMBoxWare.

[Peter Johnson]

I just now did a clean install on Ubuntu 09.10 on my laptop. (This was an attempt to remove annoying "pop" I am getting after letting the update manager do the 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade for me.) Looks like grub has changed. You need to edit the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg. There are several "menuentry" entries in that file - comment out, delete, or rearrange those as you see fit.

[Stefan Wagner]

Grub has been replaced by grub2 with karmic koala, and /boot/grub/grub.cfg starts - in my case, your's may differ - like this:

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE
#
# It is automatically generated by /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig using templates
# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub

[Joe San]

You mean to say that we have to modify the grub.cfg to change the boot order?

[Stefan Wagner]

Jothi Shankar Kumar wrote:You mean to say that we have to modify the grub.cfg to change the boot order?

Are you joking? If you don't understand "Don't edit this file", what do you understand? Every kernel-update will reset that file. You have to modify /etc/grub.d/ instead.

Here are 3 detailed introductions to grub2:

http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p20.html
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2#Adding%20Entries%20to%20Grub%202
http://grub.enbug.org/FrontPage?action=show&redirect=StartSeite

[Joe San]

Stefan Wagner wrote:

Jothi Shankar Kumar wrote:You mean to say that we have to modify the grub.cfg to change the boot order?

Are you joking? If you don't understand "Don't edit this file", what do you understand? Every kernel-update will reset that file. You have to modify /etc/grub.d/ instead.

Here are 3 detailed introductions to grub2:

http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p20.html
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2#Adding%20Entries%20to%20Grub%202
http://grub.enbug.org/FrontPage?action=show&redirect=StartSeite

Well my original post was intended to know where I could find the menu.lst. What did you actually mean to say by referring to grub.cfg? I guess you did not understand what I asked.

[Stefan Wagner]

Your first post asked where to change the bootorder, didn't it?

With grub, yes, you would change it in /boot/grub/menu.lst .
With grub2, you will change /etc/grub.d/* .

You will not change grub.cfg .

[Joe San]

Stefan Wagner wrote:Your first post asked where to change the bootorder, didn't it?

With grub, yes, you would change it in /boot/grub/menu.lst .
With grub2, you will change /etc/grub.d/* .

You will not change grub.cfg .

So what was your intention of mentioning the grub.cfg when that does not have anything to do with changing the boot order?

[Stefan Wagner]

It was Peter Johnson who told to edit grub.cfg:

Peter Johnson wrote:... You need to edit the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

So I warned not to edit grub.cfg.

I didn't say "that does not have anything to do with changing the boot order", because I know, it has. But it is a generated file, which will be overriden by every kernelupdate.

[Peter Johnson]

Sorry to add to the confusion - this was my first encounter with grub 2 and I did not see the warning at the start of the file. Thank you, Stefan, for pointing that out.