How to get the GRUB menu back if it disappears after a reinstall

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Jayn
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Joined: 08/27/2010

I was working on an aunt's 64-bit desktop which, like my 64-bit netbook, could not upgrade smoothly to 6.0. I ended up reinstalling using a ISO CD and keeping the /home partition unformatted. After a reboot, however, instead of seeing the GRUB menu list (the system is a multi-boot), I just saw the monitor display a "frequency out of range" message.

The way to make the menu visible again is to boot into Triquel (or whichever GNU/Linux distro you have installed, you may have to press the UP/DOWN arrow keys blindly and hit ENTER a few times) and run: gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

You then change the lines:
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
to:
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=false

also uncomment the line:

#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

This saved me a lot of stress and hopefully it does for you too.By the way, reinstalling 6.0 over 5.5 worked like a charm and none of the /home data was lost.