Grub default selection and countdown

[Grobbendonk]

Hi,

Over the last couple of days, my Grub install seems to have changed behaviour, but without me touching it at all.

I've got Suse 9.3 installed, with an off-the-shelf kernel, plus a customised one and winXP for games. I've not even run YaST recently.

Grub defaults to the off-the-shelf kernel, with an 8 second countdown before booting into it. But the weird bit is that it has now stopped counting down. I've tried changing a couple of settings in Grub, so that the settings should be re-applied, but nothing, it just refuses to count down. It even displays the 8 seconds (or whatever I set it to), but doesn't count.

Any ideas on a fix would be warmly welcomed, I know it's a minor thing, but I like to turn the PC on and then wander off to feed the cat or pick up the mail.

[Vergil83]

have you tried to actually edit the grub file. It should be at

/boot/grub/menu.lst

or

/boot/grub/grub.conf

and change the time
mine set for 5 sec for example

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout         5

[Grobbendonk]

have you tried to actually edit the grub file.

Thanks, I'd always stuck to the the distro utilities because I've only ever used lilo before, and I was uncertain whether I could do that.

So I've tried it, and nothing. The number does change, but the countdown doesn't happen!

[oz]

Would you mind posting your grub menu.lst file so we can have a look at it?

[Grobbendonk]

Would you mind posting your grub menu.lst file so we can have a look at it?

Of course! This is the latest version - I chopped it down today to simplify it a bit (hasn't fixed the problem, but it's not referring to two windows partitions that aren't bootable, and a couple of old kernels I tried to build and don't actually use)

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Sat Dec 24 16:29:48 GMT 2005

color white/blue black/light-gray
default 1
timeout 10


title Linux-2.6.13-15.7-default
root (hd1,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.13-15.7-default root=/dev/hdb3 vga=0x31a selinux=0 resume=/dev/hdb2 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.13-15.7-default

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###

title SUSE LINUX 10.0
root (hd1,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb3 vga=0x31a selinux=0 resume=/dev/hdb2 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: xen###

title XEN
root (hd1,2)
kernel /boot/xen.gz dom0_mem=1245184
module /boot/vmlinuz-xen root=/dev/hdb3 vga=0x31a selinux=0 resume=/dev/hdb2 splash=silent showopts
module /boot/initrd-xen

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 1###

title windows 1
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###

title Failsafe -- SUSE LINUX 10.0
root (hd1,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb3 vga=normal showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume selinux=0 nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3
initrd /boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: memtest86###