How do I change the grub boot order?

Question

I've got windows 7 and ubuntu installed on a shared machine. A lot of the non-developers use windows.

Currently the order of boot looks like the following (but not word for word)

• Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86
• Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86 (safe boot)
• Memory test
• Memory test
• Windows 7 on /sda/blah blah

How do i change it to default as windows 7 at the top of the list?

• Windows 7 on /sda/blah blah
• Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86
• Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86 (safe boot)
• Memory test
• Memory test

Answer 1

You can use an easy to use GUI app called grub-customizer to make your life a little easy. As the name suggests, you can do much more than just reordering Grub menu entries with it.

You can install it by:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

There is an article about it on this blog here. Take a look at it if you're interested. Also there is a solved thread on the Ubuntu Forums with a post that mentions this tool.

Here are some screenshots:

Answer 2

You can also change the grub default boot entry from the command line without having to install any additional tool. The won't change the order in the list but it will allow a different OS to boot by default, which sounds like what you may want anyway.

First, make a backup copy of /etc/default/grub in case something goes wrong, you can easily revert to the known-good copy.

$ sudo cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.bak

Then edit the file using vim or the text editor of your choice.

$ sudo vim /etc/default/grub

Find the line that contains GRUB_DEFAULT=0 and set it to GRUB_DEFAULT=x where x is the index of grub menu item to which you would like to boot to by default. Note that the menu items are zero-indexed. That means that the sixth item in the list is actually index 5. So to boot to the sixth item in the list, the line would read GRUB_DEFAULT=5.

Then build the updated grub menu.

$ sudo update-grub