Appendix B

Managing the GRUB Menu in a Multiboot Environment

When you boot an x86 based system, the GRUB menu is displayed. This menu contains boot entries for every OS instance that is installed on your system. From here, you can choose which OS entry to boot, or do nothing, in which case the system boots the default operating system. The GRUB menu reflects the contents of the active menu.lst configuration file on the system.

When you install the OpenSolaris operating system, the bootadm command automatically updates the menu.lst file to the include menu entries for all OS instances that are installed on the system. Any newly installed operating system is automatically listed as a new boot entry in the GRUB menu as soon as the system reboots. However, in certain cases, for example, if you previously installed Linux, the GRUB menu will not automatically include the Linux entry after installing the OpenSolaris software. This appendix describes how to manually update the menu.lst file to include a Linux entry from a previous installation.