System Tools

Boot Repair

If you have more than one operating system and bootable partition, Grub is responsible for offering menu options, by default. If you have difficulties booting a particular operating system, Boot Repair is the simplest way to rebuild the Grub menu*.

Another reason to use Boot Repair is if you add another operating system. Boot Repair will find it and add to the menu.

MX-16 Final (64-bit) is currently my primary system so I installed Grub to the Master Boot Record** (MBR) towards the end of the installation process. MX-16 is where I modify Grub, if needed. For my other partitions, Grub was installed to Root of the respective partitions. Newer systems may require alternative strategies so check the MX User Manual if necessary.

After running Boot Repair (booting from a live medium if necessary eg. you can't boot from HDD) you might want to move on to Grub Customizer, to tidy things up a bit.

Running the simple command update-grub in a Terminal, as root (ie su..enter root password) is the command line method, that does a similar thing.

After installing Linux Mint, which replaced my custom MX-16 Grub menu, I wanted to restore my original. By booting to MX-16 and running update-grub I can see my custom background images and other system partitions (MX-15, antiX-16 and Mint) are present.

As Mint had replaced my Grub loader on the MBR, I then used MX Boot Repair to reinstall the MX-16 Grub bootloader again, as follows:



If another distro is added, but does not replace the MRB Grub bootloader (by either skipping the Grub installation process or only installing Grub to the root partition of the new system), then running update-grub alone should add the newly installed system to your Grub menu.


*If installing MX to dual boot with a Windows system, you may need to run Boot Repair to detect Windows, or other newly installed systems).

**Installing Grub to the MBR will overwrite any previous Grub menu located there.

Grub Customizer

This is the easy way to customize the Grub menu. The List configuration tab allows you to edit menu names or remove any unwanted entries.

Set your own Grub menu background image as shown below (I've used my desktop wallpaper in this case for simplicity):

Grub Customizer and Advanced options


You will need to open the Advanced options when done, and uncheck the default image labeled GRUB_BACKGROUND (marine-sunrise-grub.png).

Simply save and reboot to see your new Grub menu.

Note: you may need to reload the Appearance Settings Tab if your choices are not displayed.