Dual boot 10.10 and 11.10 - no grub

Question

I installed Ubuntu 11.10 alongside existing 10.10. I expected to get a menu on startup to choose which version to start with. It booted straight into 10.10 and I didn't get the option of 11.10 at all. How can I get the menu at startup?

Answer 1

Problem solved. It appears I inadvertently overwrote the MBR in sda when installing the other OS ubuntu 11.10 alongside the existing ubuntu 10.10. Warning if you are going to dual boot - when asked where to install bootloader put it in your ubuntu partition, NOT in the root of the hard disk otherwise you will overwrite the MBR.

Solution: Using "Try Ubuntu" from live CD or USB follow the instructions in this link

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair#A2nd_option_:_install_Boot-Repair_in_Ubuntu

install the Boot Repair utility. Check Fix MBR and in the MBR tab repair it. Take a note of the instructions given in case the bootloader is trashed and restart.

When I did this grub produced a menu from which I could choose either Ubuntu 10.10 or Ubuntu 11.10

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

First, did the 'hold shift' answer from root45 work?

If not, a couple of things to check would be to verify that you do indeed have both partitions.
(It's possible the older one could have been overwritten. Just something to check.)

Provided they are both there, you could run sudo update-grub to generate a new config file for grub.