Grub Boot Issues

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.