Can I access NeoGrub boot menu when timeout=0?

G

gregr

Member
Hi all

Help!

In an effort to hide my vista drives from xp, I've managed to prevent myself accessing Vista (ie setup the hide drives commands to allow xp to boot and mask the vista drives, but didn't setup the unhide drives in an alternate grub boot entry to allow vista to boot from the vista bootloader).

Now when I select the Vista entry from the Vista bootloader it fails to boot because of the vista partition is hidden.

When I select the NeoGrub entry from the Vista bootloader it immediatesly boots XP. Because I foolishly set timeout=0 in menu.lst, I can't access the grub command line to unhide the drives, reboot and allow then vista to boot (I've since seen some posts showing what I need to do with this)

So wondering is there a key sequence I can use to access the grub menu on startup?

If not, can I install the grub boot menu to floppy so I can unhide the drives? Is there a url I could look at to see how to get the grub bootloader onto floppy?

Current configuration
hd0,1 Vista boot partition (hidden)
hd0,2 data (hidden)
hd1,1 Xp partition (visible)
hd1,2 data (hidden)

Thanks
Greg
 
Thanks, exactly what I needed, Vista back and running again. Will hang onto the disk for future problems! Time to read the sticky and get working how I wanted it to!
Greg
 
Thanks. Will take a look - in the mean time I managed to fix everything so that I can easily boot between Vista & XP

Code: 
Vista bootloader -> Vista (default)
                 -> NeoGrub
 
NeoGrub -> XP (hide Vista drives & boot XP, default)
        -> Vista (unhide Vista drives & reboot to Vista bootloader)

Would now like to be able to boot directly into Vista from Neogrub menu, but haven't yet played with that. eg

Code: 
Vista bootloader -> Vista 
                 -> NeoGrub (default, timeout=0)
 
NeoGrub -> XP (hide Vista drives and boot XP)
        -> Vista (unhide Vista drives and boot Vista, default)

Saw one post here where a guy got this working but it looked from your your reply you were working on this. Maybe this is Vista HnS? Will take a look

thanks again
Greg

Addendum:

Looks like Vista HnS will solve would have resolved my initial problem without the use of NeoGrub. However am unclear if it will make my final configuration which includes providing access to OpenSuse easier or harder? eg

Code: 
Vista bootloader -> Vista 
                 -> NeoGrub (default, timeout=0)
 
NeoGrub -> XP (hide Vista drives and boot XP)
        -> OpenSUSE (hide Vista drives and boot linux)
        -> Vista (unhide Vista drives and boot Vista, default)
 
Last edited:
You'd end up with

Code: 
Vista HnS 
            -> XP
            -> Second Boot Menu
                                          -> Vista
                                          -> OpenSUSE

Solution is to add OpenSUSE to Vista HnS's boot menu (*not* the NeoGrub one) manually once its configured:

Code: 
Vista HnS 
            -> XP
            -> Vista
            -> OpenSUSE
 
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