Hello to all,

I recently installed windows xp and Ubuntu 11.10 in my HP Compaq nx6310 series laptop. But now,I am not able to view the boot options for Linux whereas whenever I start my computer, windows gets booted up by default. Kindly help me by finding out to find boot options for Linux.


Is my GRUB got corrupted ?



DUMA188

Hi there,

in which order? - If you installed any Linux distro first, and then Windows, the Linux bootloader (usually GRUB) is overwritten by the Windows setup.

Not necessarily. I've seen a concerning number of PCs recently where GRUB2 didn't set a valid video mode - with the result that you look at a blank screen during boot, your monitor may complain that the video signal is out of range, and after the usual 10s timeout, GRUB boots the default OS. I experienced that myself with Linux Mint 12 on three PCs, but I've heard about this occasionally happening with Ubuntu 11.x as well. Maybe any other distro that uses GRUB2.

The solution is to open the GRUB configuration file /etc/default/grub in an editor, and uncomment (remove the hash sign) the line
You should also hide (comment) the lines
After that, you should see the GRUB menu at least in text mode. When you got that working, you can try to switch to a supported graphics mode by trying parameters for GRUB_GFXMODE, while hiding the GRUB_TERMINAL directive again.

To edit the GRUB config file, however, you may have to boot your PC from a live Linux CD or USB pen drive; alternatively you can install the Ext2IFS driver in Windows, which enables Windows to read and write Linux ext2/3 partitions (AFAIK it doesn't yet support ext4).

[X] Doc CPU

Use your ubuntu as a live cd install and in terminal give us the results from running command
#(-l is a small -L), then post the results

If you did install windows after ubuntu then it might be easier to reinstall ubuntu again. Remember windows aways wants to be first (first disk, first partition, and first distro install) and it does little bad things if it is not first.

Make it easy on yourself: forget about the pretty splash-screens and just let it display the starting menu in text mode.

Hi there,

that's exactly what I'm restoring with what I described in my post above, because that functionality seems broken with many recent GRUB2 installations. They just blank the screen, so that you see neither the GRUB menu, nor the kernel startup messages. You're blindfolded until the default OS's login screen appears.

Whether that's intentional or a bug, I can't tell. But if it's intentional, it's a very evil feature.

[X] Doc CPU