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Accepted
Levan
Asked: 2012-06-06 03:18:00 +0800 CST

How to remove duplicate entries in Grub menu?

  • 772

After today's update, Ubuntu asked me to replace some files and I blindly accepted. After I restarted PC after the update, I saw duplicate entries in the grub menu:

enter image description here

Here's the image of the grub customizer.

enter image description here

Apparently, Grub Customizer can not save edited information.

Is there a way to remove duplicates from Ubuntu 12.04 grub menu and set Windows 7 on first position?

grub2

5 Answers

  1. For permanent fix:

    sudo mv /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober /etc/grub.d/07_os-prober

    and Windows will be on top even after updates

    • 8
  2. Best Answer

    While a sudo update-grub2 should remove the duplicate enties, to bring the Windows menu-item at first position additionally do :

    1. sudo gedit /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    2. Cut the portion of text starting from
      ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
      menuentry "Windows 7...
      to
      }
      ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
      and pest it just before
      menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux..

    3. save the file and reboot.

    4. You have to perform steps(1-4) every time grub-pc package-update or a kernel-update happens to keep Windows menu-item at first place.

    • 4

  3. i think you've already been helped. But just in case a newbie needs an easy way to change the order of the grub menu and even delete (careful here!!) entries, there is a nice GUI way in linux to do so, with the grub-customizer.

    Go to the terminal and type:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppstrong texta:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer


sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

    Then look up the newly installed grub customizer, start it and you can move windows or ubuntu upwards / downwards in the list.

    • 3

  4. You can also remove old unused kernel packages and this effectively removes also the grub entries and frees harddrive space. To do that you need to check what kernels are installed using:

     sudo dpkg -l | grep linux-image

    And then you can remove the kernel image using:

     sudo apt-get remove linux-image-version_number

    where version_number is the kernel version you want to remove. I recommend you leave at least two kernel versions available just in case something goes wrong.

    • 1

  5. I have just went from an upgrade from 11.04 to 12.04 LTS.

    While I cannot find an "expected" listing of /etc/grub.d/ for different OS versions anywhere, from another computer I have access to, the original 11.04 entries are:

    $ ls /etc/grub.d/
00_header        10_linux      20_memtest86+  40_custom  README
05_debian_theme  20_linux_xen  30_os-prober   41_custom

    On the updated PC, after the update, I have:

    $ ls /etc/grub.d/
00_header        10_os-prober  30_memtest86+     40_custom
05_debian_theme  20_linux      30_os-prober      41_custom
10_linux         20_linux_xen  30_uefi-firmware  README

    Obviously, I've gotten some entries there which are duplicates - so not even running sudo update-grub2 as @Samik suggest does not remove duplicate entries in this case.

    The answer for this case would obviously be to remove the duplicate _os-prober and _linux entries, and then running sudo update-grub2.

    • 0