I'm running Mandrake 9 on an Omnibook 6000 with Grub as the boot manager. I've used RedHat 8 before and was able to edit my boot options in the grub.conf file in the /etc directory. There is no grub.conf file to edit on my Mandrake system. How do you edit the grub boot options that show up at boot time ? preferable non-gui but anyway will do....

Have a look in:

/boot/grub/menu.lst

or make one if there isn't one.

I found the file menu.lst. It resembles the grub.conf file in RedHat. I made the changes to the file that I wanted, timeout and default, saved the changes and rebooted, but the changes don't show up at boot time. There must be more to it than just editing this file.....

Nope. It's just a matter of editing the file.

If you want, you can rerun the install program:

grub-install /dev/hda

but you don't need to.

If it doesn't work out, post the output of

fdisk -l /dev/hda

and post the output of

more /boot/grub/menu.lst

and we'll work it out. Try changing a few options first.

Before modifying the menu.lst file, my grub screen at boot up shows the following choices:
linux
failsafe
NT
floppy

linux is the default and the timeout is counting down from 10 seconds:

After modifying the menu.lst file as shown below, the grub screen at boot up shows the same thing:
linux
failsafe
NT
floppy

linux is the default and the timeout is counting down from 10 seconds again.

The only things I modified was the linux and NT titles, and the number of seconds till timeout.....
-----------------------------------------
Output of /boot/grub/menu.lst before modification:
*************************
timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
i18n (hd0,4)/boot/grub/messages
keytable (hd0,4)/boot/us.klt
altconfigfile (hd0,4)/boot/grub/menu.once
default 0

title linux
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 devfs=mount
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 failsafe devfs=nomount
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd.img

title NT
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title floppy
root (fd0)
chainloader +1

----------------------------------------
Output of /boot/grub/menu.lst after modification:
*********
timeout 20
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
i18n (hd0,4)/boot/grub/messages
keytable (hd0,4)/boot/us.klt
altconfigfile (hd0,4)/boot/grub/menu.once
default 0

title Mandrake
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 devfs=mount
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 failsafe devfs=nomount
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd.img

title Windows2000
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title floppy
root (fd0)
chainloader +1
--------------------------------------------
Output of fdisk -l /dev/hda:
*********
Disk /dev/hda: 240 heads, 63 sectors, 2584 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 2 15088+ 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/hda2 3 1390 10493280 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3 1391 2584 9026640 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 1391 2104 5397808+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 2105 2137 249448+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda7 2138 2584 3379288+ 83 Linux

My apologies Q Bert - i just THOUGHT I was using Grub, actually it's Lilo. I edited my lilo.conf, ran lilo then robooted and my changes had been made. Thanks for the information regarding the menu.lst file for grub though. I hate making these kind of mistakes but I guess I'm not the first one.......

It works now. So that's ok. Lots of people are confused by the lilo/grub thing.