Hi,

I just recently bought a toshiba satellite a500 laptop which had windows7 installed. I overwrote the OS with ubuntu 11.10 and that is now the only operating system on the laptop.

When I boot the machine, a screen appears that says "booting from harddrive"
and then continues on to the login page. However I noticed that there is no grub bootloader menu which gives me an option to either choose regular startup or recovery mode.
I had this on another laptop that had a wubi installation with primary OS as windows vista, and ubuntu 11.10 running off of windows.

However I do not see this on my new laptop. I know that grub is installed because the option appeared during my installation from usb, but did I do something wrong here? Or is this normal?

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

See this link, it explains how to get grub to show at boot time.

-->http://www.easy-ubuntu-linux.com/grub-menu-visible.html

Thank you so much.
The link was quite helpful!

You are welcome.

If this gets your problem fixed, could you mark the thread Solved under thread tools at the top?
That helps other looking for solutions to their problems.

I actually figured out that my version of grub is different from the one on the website that you provided.
I think this ubuntu uses grub2.

Here is a website which fixes the problem for anyone with this version:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

Thank you!