how to force grub to boot (no human input) regardless previous booting failure

Question

When previous boot was failed. (because of power failure, hardware failure) booting will hang at the grub menu for human prompt.

Can you set option to force boot up no matter what happened?

Answer 1

Add

GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT=0

to /etc/default/grub and that is solved my problem on Ubuntu Server 12.04.4

Grub uses GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT as the timeout when last boot failed. Its value defaults to -1, which means wait forever.

Answer 2

Ok I found solution myself via shlug mail list.

what you do is to modify the /etc/grub.d/00_header and find:

if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then
  set timeout=-1
else
  set timeout=3
fi

change timeout = -1 to 0.

-1 means manual selection.

also remember to update-grub afterward, to generate the actual grub.cfg

Answer 3

This was reported as bug #841009 for ubuntu. I tried setting -1 to 0, but didn't work for me. So i tried another solution given here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/841009

Quote:

[...] solution is to set GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=-1 as suggested on ubuntu forums at this page http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1403517 but i've not tried this solution yet.

Quote:

grub2 in ubuntu 9.10 server is configured by default with GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0. If there is no keyboard attached (as in my headless setup), this causes grub2 to go to menu and stay there. Setting it to -1 gives me the desired sequence of menu, timeout and default choice.

I don't know if this is a grub2 bug or not, but if this is intended grub2 behavior, the default config for a server distro such as ubuntu server (which you would expect to function headless out of the box) should be different.

It worked for me.