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Changing GRUB options in Ubuntu on the fly

S

screw3d

Diamond Member
So I figured out how to change 'default' in /boot/grub/menu.lst to whatever OS that I want to boot up with. Say my GRUB menu is configured like this at the moment, and 'default' is set to 0:

0: kernel 2.6
1: kernel 2.6 recovery mode
2: ubuntu memtest86
3: ----------separator---------
4: win xp

Say if I'm logged in remotely via SSH and I want to boot to win xp, is there a way for me to reboot to Windows XP (default 4) just for once, without changing 'default' to '4'?

I'm imagining something like reboot --boot-option='4' so I can choose which OS to load at boot up?
 
I don't think you can pass options to the boot loader like that, I could be wrong though

you CAN setup a serial port and push grub out to it, so you could telnet into a console server and choose OS's that way. If you have a router running *nix the ser2net packages work well for this.
 
Originally posted by: nweaver
I don't think you can pass options to the boot loader like that, I could be wrong though

you CAN setup a serial port and push grub out to it, so you could telnet into a console server and choose OS's that way. If you have a router running *nix the ser2net packages work well for this.
Click to expand...

Thanks.. I'm looking for a simpler solution though..

Oh well.. is there something like a "reboot and load this particular menu.lst in GRUB"?
 
fat32 partiton for /boot, so you could mount/edit it in windows as well as linux would work, so change it to boot to xp, change it back to boot to Ubuntu...or better, have 2 configs and just change filenames, as editing text files in windows sucks, it's buggy 🙂
 
Grub is (relativly) easier for most folks, but Lilo is more fully featured, from what I have seen. I use grub most of the time
 
Grub is (relativly) easier for most folks, but Lilo is more fully featured, from what I have seen. I use grub most of the time
Click to expand...

How is lilo more featureful? Just the fact that grub understands filesystems and doesn't need it's boot record reinstalled whenever you touch one of it's files is enough of a feature to make lilo look like crap. A few other features that come in handy is the ability to remap drives, hide/unhide partitions, change partition types, change drive geometries, load menu graphics, etc. But it has been a while since I've used lilo, so it's possible it has some of those features now.
 
Na. Lilo is the same old beast.

What is nice about lilo is that if your doing things like software raid or whatnot it can deal with that.. while with grub you generally have to have a seperate /boot partition. Also I think it can deal with LVM's better. Then you have elilo which can deal with the new EFI stuff from Intel/Mac-land.

Not that I've used it for a while either. I like grub because if I goof with a kernel upgrade or with a setting I can manually set the boot parameters from the command line (even has autocomplete!), which is very nice.
 
So there isn't a way without messing with the partitioning? I'll look at this later when I'm more proficient at all this 🙂
 
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