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I've got a VPS that's merrily running Ubuntu 10.04 server (I believe it's on Xen). I was doing some kernel maintenance and updating grub when I noticed that the update-grub tool writes an accurate grub.cfg, but this is apparently ignored by Grub in favour of menu.lst, which the update tool ignores.

Sure enough, if I manually edit menu.lst, I can boot into whatever kernel I like.

Why this discrepancy? Is this a quirk of the VM template that my hosting provider uses, or is something else broken?

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  • What is the output of dpkg -S /usr/sbin/update-grub? and then apt-cache show {package} where {package} is the name dpkg returns?
    – Zoredache
    Mar 13, 2012 at 18:34
  • grub-pc: /usr/sbin/update-grub is the output of dpkg, and I've got a pastebin for the apt-cache show output: pastebin.com/XRZUPdeH
    – growse
    Mar 14, 2012 at 8:52
  • Was the system updated from a previous version? Are you sure that the grub binary in the bootloader got upgraded as well? Can you try doing a ` dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc`, and make sure it updates your MBR?
    – Zoredache
    Mar 14, 2012 at 15:57

1 Answer 1

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Grub2 uses grub.cfg, not Grub1.

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  • Just to be clear: Grub 1.98 is Grub 2
    – Gregory MOUSSAT
    Mar 13, 2012 at 17:31
  • That is obviously correct, but does it really answer the question?. The question seems to have more to do with the tools on Debian/Ubuntu to automatically write a configuration.
    – Zoredache
    Mar 13, 2012 at 18:36
  • This is the point - update-grub seems to create grub.cfg, but the grub bootloader seems to read menu.lst on boot. Surely this isn't broken by default on Ubuntu 10.04?
    – growse
    Mar 14, 2012 at 8:54
  • Yeah, I answered you yesterday in comments @growse but it looks like SO ate my post. I'm tempted to think your idea about the VM template is right at the moment, this doesn't seem like Ubuntu behavior.
    – gparent
    Mar 14, 2012 at 15:22

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