9.1.1 The File /boot/grub/menu.lst
The graphical splash screen with the boot menu is based on the GRUB conguration
le /boot/grub/menu.lst, which contains all information about all partitions or
operating systems that can be booted by the menu.
Every time the system is booted, GRUB loads the menu le from the le system. For
this reason, GRUB does not need to be reinstalled after every change to the le. Use
the YaST boot loader to modify the GRUB conguration as described in Section 9.2,
“Conguring the Boot Loader with YaST” (page 166).
The menu le contains commands. The syntax is very simple. Every line contains a
command followed by optional parameters separated by spaces like in the shell. For
historical reasons, some commands permit an = in front of the rst parameter. Comments
are introduced by a hash (#).
To identify the menu items in the menu overview, set a title for every entry. The
text (including any spaces) following the keyword title is displayed as a selectable
option in the menu. All commands up to the next title are executed when this menu
item is selected.
The simplest case is the redirection to boot loaders of other operating systems. The
command is chainloader and the argument is usually the boot block of another
partition, in GRUB block notation. For example:
chainloader (hd0,3)+1
The device names in GRUB are explained in Section 9.1.1.1, “Naming Conventions
for Hard Disks and Partitions” (page 159). This example species the rst block of the
fourth partition of the rst hard disk.
Use the command kernel to specify a kernel image. The rst argument is the path to
the kernel image in a partition. The other arguments are passed to the kernel on its
command line.
If the kernel does not have built-in drivers for access to the root partition or a recent
Linux system with advanced hotplug features is used, initrd must be specied with
a separate GRUB command whose only argument is the path to the initrd le. Be-
cause the loading address of the initrd is written into the loaded kernel image, the
command initrd must follow after the kernel command.
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