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Old 06-02-2005, 05:29 PM   #1
blair
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Changes to GRUB menu.lst not taking effect


I am trying to make a trivial cosmetic change to aMandrake v10.1 GRUB bootloader menu. It says "linux" and "windows" and I would like to change this to "Mandrake Linux" and "Windows XP". I also want to change the default OS auto-select timer from 10 seconds to 60 seconds.

I have made the necessary changes using Emacs to the *title* tags in /boot/grub/menu.lst and saved the changes. When I 'cat' the menu.lst file from the console, I can confirm that my changes have been saved to the file, and the file name has not changed. Yet when I reboot my system, the changes have not taken effect. I still see the original boot menu entries. (This change worked fine on my RedHat v9 box which uses grub.conf and has a menu.lst file which symbolically links to grub.conf. I searched the Mandrake box and do not see any grub.conf, nor does the menu.lst symbolically link to any other files.)

Why doesn't GRUB load my modified menu.lst file when the machine starts up? Is there another file Mandrake is looking for? Is there something I'm missing?

thanks for any assistance.
 
Old 06-03-2005, 09:54 AM   #2
jailbait
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"Why doesn't GRUB load my modified menu.lst file when the machine starts up? Is there another file Mandrake is looking for? Is there something I'm missing?"

I don't know what is wrong but you may be able to straighten out the problem by using the grub-install command:

grub-install /dev/hda

Substitute the name of your boot device for /dev/hda.

---------------------------
Steve Stites
 
Old 06-04-2005, 12:16 AM   #3
blair
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Thanks for your assistance. Mission partially accomplished. I carefully read the GRUB manual 50 times before doing anything (terrified to trash my boot sector; I learned quite a lot in the process) and then I ran the appropriate GRUB commands.

Good News: I now have the desired GRUB menu items and timer and my boot menu works correctly. I now have full control via the GRUB config file.

Bad News: A consequence of this action is that the original Mandrake bootloader menu, which is GUI-based, has now been replaced with a with a generic GRUB bootloader menu which is character-based (i.e. a DOS-like UI). Perfectly functional but not as pretty as the original. Also, much slower from machine startup to display of the bootloader screen.

I feel more comfortable now knowing I have a standard GRUB config I can muck with to my heart's content via the /boot/grub/menu.lst config file, but I'm wondering where my fancy bootloader screen went. I am speculating that the standard Mandrake 10.1 distro installed a proprietary GUI-based bootloader app.

If anyone out there knows exactly what Mandrake is doing with the boot menu, I'd appreciate your insights.

Thanks.

- Blair
 
Old 06-04-2005, 09:12 AM   #4
jailbait
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" I'm wondering where my fancy bootloader screen went. "

You can set what bootloader screen to use with the gfxmenu parameter in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Here is my (SuSE).

gfxmenu (hd0,0)/boot/message

I don't know where Mandrake keeps their graphics menu. If you have a copy of your original menu.lst you should take a look at that.

--------------------------
Steve Stites
 
Old 06-04-2005, 09:52 AM   #5
blair
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Registered: Apr 2005
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Thanks. I dug through the Mandrake manuals again and this time I found something I had missed before. In the control center:

Start/System/Configuration/Configure Your Computer/Boot/Boot Loader

is a GUI-based tool for editing/managing your boot loader menu. Problem solved. I should have RTFM a little closer the first time. Now I wanted to convert back from the character based GRUB boot menu to the GUI-based Mandrake menu.

Since I blew away the Mandrake boot loader and replaced it with a true native GRUB boot loader, I simply rebooted from the CD, exited from the install menu, booted using "restore" and the Mandrake Rescue program loaded. I restored the Reinstall Boot Loader rescue option, rebooted into Mandrake proper, and saw the original boot loader menu restored. I then went in to the Mandrak Boot Loader control panel where I was able to easily make the changes I wanted to make. Problem solved.

One minor nit: the Mandrake boot loader control panel does not allow you to re-order the list of boot options, whereas GRUB does.

Lastly, it was bugging me that I couldn't find where Mandrake buried the menu options. Since one of the bootloader menu entries was Windows_98, I simply did a grep -lr 'Windows_98' /* to search my system for files containing that exact string. The answer: /boot/map. This is a binary file, not a text-based file, so it can not be edited directly. But now I know A) where Mandrake stores this info and B) how to edit it within the provided control panel. Learn something new every day.

Thanks again for your leads.
 
  


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