Subscribe to How-To Geek

Recommended: Click Here to Run a Free Scan for Common PC Errors   [Sponsored Link]

Make Grub Bootloader Wait Indefinitely for OS Selection

If you are doing a lot of testing of different builds, there's nothing more annoying than rebooting and then having the system boot into the wrong choice on the grub menu before you have a chance to pick the one you want. Reader Victor wrote in with this tip: You can just comment out the timeout line entirely to stop grub from picking anything, giving you time to get your morning coffee.

All you need to do is open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your favorite text editor (in sudo mode)

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the section of the file that contains the timeout information

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined)
# timeout      3

Just put a # before the "timeout 3″ line in the file, then save and restart your computer.

image

Now grub will wait forever until you make a choice. This is especially useful if you want to prevent your computer from ever booting into Windows…

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 07/25/07 and tagged with: Ubuntu, Linux

Comments (1)

  1. Adam

    That command opened it up in terminal for me and I had to scroll down the page with the blinking typing box and it wouldnt let me modify any values. I prefer "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst".


Leave a Comment




Leave your friendly comment here. If you have a computer help question, leave it on the forums instead.

Note: Your comment may not show up immediately on the site.

Copyright © 2006-2008 HowToGeek.com. All Rights Reserved.