Comment 16 for bug 797544

I spent about 15 hours trying to figure out why my headless Ubuntu 14.04 Beta server wasn't booting. No IPMI or remote hands were available in this case, unfortunately. I finally got on the right track when I noticed in my identical test VM that grub2 wasn't always automatically booting the first menuentry. After a few more dead ends with some grub options, a Google search for 'grub2 not automatic' led me to an askubuntu answer that mentioned GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT. Setting it to a positive integer fixed my boot problems.