Is it possible to override the grub timeout setting after improper boot

Question

Hi my question pertains to Grub2. I am running Ubuntu on a bunch of industrial PC's which are out of reach and hence cannot be connected using keyboard / mouse.

I have noticed when the OS does not fully boot and I unplug the power and power on again, the grub menu loads but there is no timeout on this particular instance of the GRUB menu. This is perfectly reasonable as this would generally require human intervention to decide if you want to boot into the recovery etc. hoever, I would like to override this and set a timeout and boot to the OS every time.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If you add timeout=10 to /boot/grub/custom.cfg (creating the file if it doesn't already exist) then the menu will be displayed for 10 seconds every boot, regardless of any settings in /etc/default/grub or any failed boots. If you do this, you should also add a comment explaining this to /etc/default/grub so that the next person that tries to change the timeout (which is normally done by editing /etc/default/grub) will know that the setting has been overridden in /boot/grub/custom.cfg.