I guess it’s progress. There was a time when I used to have machines con­fig­ured so that, if on boot, I held the shift-key down, I got a menu for mul­ti­ple boot choices on a dual-boot PC.

So let’s just spell that out.

On a dual boot PC, what I want to do is be able to access the grub menu on boot, if I feel like it. And if I don’t, I just want it to silently boot the default OS.

9 times out of 10 I want my PC to just boot up the default OS with­out ques­tions. And if I want to inter­rupt the boot and get the grub menu, I want to be able to do that. It’s not much to ask.

That’s it. That’s all I want. Used to be able to do it. Now I can’t. I’ve just spent a cou­ple of “surely I’m miss­ing some­thing really obvi­ous” hours look­ing for the tweak, the vari­able, the switch to do this. And I don’t think you can. Can you?

I have had the hilar­i­ous plea­sure of setting

GRUB_TIMEOUT=0

in /etc/default/grub. Cer­tainly not one of my bet­ter ideas, but nice to know I’m not the only one. I needed a visit to unet­bootin to cre­ate a bootable usb drive to fix things. Even that was a bit inel­e­gant, involv­ing as it did directly edit­ing /boot/grub/grub.cfg on the root par­ti­tion, then reboot­ing, then ‘doing it prop­erly’ by edit­ing /etc/default/grub and run­ning update-grub.

So all I want is to have the machine qui­etly boot­ing into Windows7 by default, and if I choose oth­er­wise, allow me to inter­rupt the boot and get the grub menu. I use to do this in LILO, and I’m sure it used to be pos­si­ble in GRUB. Now I’m not so sure.

I’ve even tried step 11 of the GRUB2 tweaks, and that did some­thing. It hid the menu alto­gether. Not what I’m after. And I’m wary of hack­ing con­fig files too much, secure in the knowl­edge that they have a habit of get­ting unhacked on upgrades.

So I’ll give up on this one.