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If you press escape in grub menu you end up at the grub command prompt.

My question is, how can I go back to the menu, without rebooting?

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    So I finally got it working using escape. I have to be very careful though to stop hitting escape at just the right time otherwise it brings me to the grub terminal and there's no way to go back to the grub startup options screen. – obesechicken13 Jun 19 '18 at 20:48
  • Is there a way to get to the Grub menu via a command? None of the below answers are working for me. – semitones Jul 14 '20 at 19:15
41

Type normal, hit Enter, and then tap ESC until the menu is displayed. Hitting ESC at this point won't drop you to the grub command prompt (so don't worry about hitting ESC too many times).

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    I'm amazed the only answer to actually work for me was the one with joint least votes. – Thor84no Sep 19 '18 at 20:32
  • Jack, you are my hero. I searched for 2 days about this and I find it in some random answer. Your beautiful profile picture and your name will forever be engraved in my heart. Thank you, you beautiful soul. – cgf Apr 27 '19 at 15:03
  • Unfortunately, hitting escape multiple times Doesn't take you to the grub menu -- it just boots into whatever grub was going to boot into. – semitones Jul 14 '20 at 19:14
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Executing the normal command brought me back to the grub menu.

I found this command (and others) by pressing Tab in the grub CLI.

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    it just boots normally, does not show the grub menu – dashesy Nov 8 '16 at 1:50
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    normal does nothing on my system. – James Moore Apr 7 '18 at 2:43
  • boots normaly, the answer above did the trick – masterleo Dec 31 '19 at 16:13
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Type exit and then press your Enter key twice. Or press Esc.

More info:

http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p20/GRUB2%20CLI%20Mode%20Commands.html

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    Esc does bring me next prompt, it's like Enter and exit does exit grub and bring me back to the bootloader, rEFInd in my case. That's booted in EFI mode and maybe that's changing grub behaviour. – sorin Nov 24 '13 at 16:09
  • Umm.. weird, it should allow you to go to the boot menu according to the manuals I've found... – Braiam Nov 24 '13 at 16:21
  • that starts network boot, it does not show the menu, it seems nothing does! – dashesy Nov 8 '16 at 1:49
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    This just launches me into some kind of hardware testing – Ben Farmer Feb 26 '18 at 14:13
  • @BenFarmer, does the testing ever end? What happens after? – obesechicken13 Jun 19 '18 at 19:08
0

What worked for me was holding down SHIFT and pressing ESC several times.

SHIFT+ESC
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  • on virtualbox this worked for me – Foad Dec 29 '17 at 2:08
-3

I also was looking for the answer, and after reading your posts, I looked at the [TAB] commands and found that 'quit' worked for exiting and taking me right back to the DOS prompt.

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    What do you mean? I a man confused. – fosslinux Jul 25 '17 at 4:43
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    That command does not exist in my menu – Ben Farmer Feb 26 '18 at 14:14

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