Dual-booting MEPIS and WinXP, I want Grub to default to WinXP
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Dual-booting MEPIS and WinXP, I want Grub to default to WinXP
Woohoo! Looks like I just pulled off my first Linux installation without fragging WinXP. I love that QTPartition is free, and all the Windows partition managers want to charge $40 to $120.
I installed SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1, which comes with Grub.
One minor annoyance: I have a wireless USB mouse/keyboard combo. Linux apparently loads Grub before it loads any USB drivers, so I can't use my keyboard to select different options in the boot menu. I have a PS/2 adapter, but I sure wish Grub worked with USB.
But here's my real question: I want to change the Grub options so that WindowsXP is the default selection. That is, after 10 seconds of no key pressing it will launch XP rather than launching MEPIS. How can I do this?
Look for /boot/grub/grub.conf (or simply for grub.conf). Take notice of which option is your WinXP, if there are only 2 entries and Mepis is your first one (that would be 0) then WinXP would be 1. Right? At the beginning of the file theres a line that reads "default 0" change it to 1 or whatever number WinXP is. Thats it.
jjf, You'll need to edit the file boot/grub/menu.lst as root. Here's what mine looks like. You need to move the Windows section up above the Mepis section. Just cut and paste the Windows section in above the Mepis section. Your hard drive setup may be different than mine, so just use mine as an example, edit your own menu.lst file. Make a backup copy before you have at it, so you can repair it easily if something goes wrong. The post by mebrelith is correct for some distros, Fedora works this way, but Mepis is different. Good luck!
I agree with sprintman, my file path is:hda2 root; file:/boot/grub
look for menu.1st, open it and cut and paste just the whole section for your windows , and put it on top of the mepis section that will change the boot screen to read windows partition first, dont forget you need to login as root to change this...hope this helps...
Distribution: Mepis 3.4-3; Puppy 2.12; WinXP Pro (rarely)
Posts: 54
Rep:
I also agree with sprintman. In my system - my file path is:hda2 root; file:/boot/grub. Log-in as 'root' FIRST - look for menu.1st, open it and edit it - you really only need to add the following as shown in my example below - 'default = 1' and 'savedefault'
grub.conf is generally a symlink to menu.lst. Either way you are editing the same file.
Quote:
open it and cut and paste just the whole section for your windows , and put it on top of the mepis section that will change the boot screen to read windows partition first
That is ridiculous. Do you not think it is easier to simply change "default 0" to "default 1"?
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