A while back, I updated one of my servers (Abydos) from Ubuntu 8.0.4 Server to Ubuntu 8.10 Server. That process was pretty easy, but when I rebooted, it failed to boot. I simply selected another kernel version from the boot menu and forgot about it. Then Ben ran into the same issue when he updated his desktop (Loki). I decided to learn a little bit about Grub.
It turns out that fixing the problem is pretty simple. The file to change is /boot/grub/menu.lst, and it contains a default line:
default 0
and a bunch of title lines:
title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic (recovery mode) title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic (recovery mode) title Ubuntu 8.10, memtest86+
Grub uses zero based indexing, so I changed default from 0 to 2. It’s as simple as that.