I’ve seen it stated in several threads in this forum (and also it comes up in the AI overview in a Google search) that, in order to get the GRUB menu to show up even when you have only one boot entry, you either hold Shift pressed while booting, or you repeatedly hit Esc, depending on whether you’re booting with BIOS or UEFI.
I don’t know which one I’m booting with (I guess UEFI) so I tried both, and neither works.
Holding shift does nothing, and repeatedly hitting Esc repeatedly switches between the normal splash screen and a text screen with logs.
What is the actual way that works?
I know I can edit the GRUB configuration to make the boot menu permanent, then boot, then edit it again, but I don’t want to do that every single time I want to boot with the menu.
Now I’ve also tried:
> sudo grub-editenv - set menu_show_once=1
and rebooted, and the GRUB menu still didn’t show up at the next boot
And even changing GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden to GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu did not work!
I was using my laptop, as I always do, with the lid closed and an external keyboard and monitor.
GRUB only takes keyboard input from the built-in keyboard (which I think is stupid) and that’s why the Esc key from the external keyboard wasn’t doing anything.
And also, GRUB only shows the boot menu on the built-in screen (which again I think is stupid as I’m pretty sure modern hardware allows it to see external monitors if it wanted to), so that’s why I wasn’t seeing it.
You might need to extend the GRUB timeout. I guess I need to do this with mine also, since the external monitor (which is actually a TV/monitor) takes too long to “wake up” (switch resolutions) and I always miss it.
No such issue when I was using a proper (dedicated) monitor.
The two replies I posted, one saying I tried additional steps that didn’t work, and the other one where I said I figured it out, which I marked as solution, shouldn’t have been merged. Moderators, pleas undo that so I can again mark the actual solution as solution. Having a post that starts with “Now I tried this and didn’t work” marked as solution is needlessly confusing.
