stuck on grub menu after power cut *very dangerous for servers*

[Vincenzo Ampolo]

As reported on stackoverflow at this page http://serverfault.com/questions/269387/how-to-force-grub-to-boot-no-human-input-regardless-previous-booting-failure if a power cut affects an ubuntu server it gets stuck on grub menu at next reboot waiting for a user to press "enter" to make the server boot.

This is a very odd behavior expecially if there are not integrity problems and the system can boot without user intervention. I've tested this bug on ubuntu oneiric beta 1 but it seems that all the versions with grub2 are affected.

To reproduce the bug just install a new ubuntu server, cause a power cut, make it boot.

Surfing online i found two solutions to this problem.

First solution involves to modify /etc/grub.d/00_header at line 233 such that:

  set timeout=-1

becomes:

  set timeout=0

and then run update-grub.

Second solution is to set GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=-1 as suggested on ubuntu forums at this page http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1403517 but i've not tried this solution yet.

[Nyan Cat (nyancat)]

My suggestion is to make this hidden timeout default on Ubuntu Server, but leave option to configure it.