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4

I read here at this thread that holding Shift during boot can bring up the GRUB menu. However I try holding one or the other Shift keys, tapping, tapping then holding, nothing works. Am I missing something? How does one access the GRUB menu during boot time?

No dual boot here, just standard Lubuntu 14.04 install.

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It depends on the hardware. Sometimes ESC works. – Pilot6 Sep 1 '15 at 10:17
    
Gave ESC a try too. That key is used by my BIOS to enter its settings menu. I tried ESC after the BIOS splash screen just before the Ubuntu splash but no luck either. I just can't seem to get in there on this machine (ASUS X200M). No problem with other machines. – colorful-shirts Sep 1 '15 at 21:17
1  
Another factor would be timing to press. Press and hold Esc key after the BIOS splash screen worked for me. Pressing earlier would land me to CSM screen (since I have disabled Secure boot). I can just suggest timing. – clearkimura Oct 6 '15 at 14:54
up vote 5 down vote

I have an X200MA. To enter grub menu you press ESC while booting, then choose ubuntu from boot menu.

Then you will get to grub menu.

You may have problems if you installed Ubuntu not in UEFI mode. I did not test it that way.

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shift wasn't working for me, esc did work. thanks. – Alexander Mills Jun 12 '17 at 3:27
up vote 4 down vote

I also cannot access the GRUB menu by any manner of pressing shift or esc on my Asus X205TA. To get the GRUB menu to display at boot, I had to modify the /etc/default/grub file. See this page.

To get the GRUB menu to display every time (until I change it back) I used nano to edit the file in the terminal. Type:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

find the line that says GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
put # at the start of this line to comment it out

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0

and make sure GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 or some other number bigger than zero. When done exit nano saving changes and run

sudo update-grub
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I'm very late getting back to this, but this worked for me too, thank you! – colorful-shirts Jun 9 '17 at 13:15

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