Grub menu at boot time... "holding shift" not working

I read here at this thread that holding Shift during boot can bring up the GRUB menu. However I try holding one or the other Shift keys, tapping, tapping then holding, nothing works. Am I missing something? How does one access the GRUB menu during boot time?

No dual boot here, just standard Lubuntu 14.04 install.

I also cannot access the GRUB menu by any manner of pressing shift or esc on my Asus X205TA. To get the GRUB menu to display at boot, I had to modify the /etc/default/grub file. See this page.

To get the GRUB menu to display every time (until I change it back) I used nano to edit the file in the terminal. Type:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

find the line that says GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 or GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden put # at the start of this line to comment it out

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0

or

#GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden

and make sure GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 or some other number bigger than zero. When done exit nano saving changes and run

sudo update-grub

I have an X200MA. To enter the GRUB menu, you press Esc while booting. Choose Ubuntu to boot normally.

You may have problems if you installed Ubuntu not in UEFI mode. I did not test it that way.

I had the same problem. The system would boot directly and my monitor would be in out-of-range mode. I pressed ↑ repeatedly until I thought GRUB was waiting for a command, then I pressed ↓, Enter, ↓ to select recovery mode.

It took a few tries or randomness, but when I entered recovery mode the display came back. I then:

1. Selected root for a root prompt
2. Ran mount -o rw,remount / to mount the filesystem in read-write mode
3. Ran vi /etc/default/grub
4. Removed # from GRUB_TERMINAL=console
5. Saved the file
6. Ran update-grub to update GRUB
7. Ran exit to return to the menu and continue booting

GRUB would show up, the monitor would work, and then I could log in.

I am answering this question in hope that it will help someone else in the Future.

Usually you are right in trying to get to Grub with Shift! But Grub usually explicitly prohibits using the Shift key if you have "Fastboot" enabled:

if [ "\${fastboot}" = "1" ]; then
  # timeout_style=menu + timeout=0 avoids the countdown code keypress check
  set timeout_style=menu
  set timeout=0

Taken from /etc/grub.d/12_menu_auto_hide

But the other people who answered in here are right aswell, but I think for a different problem. If the Grub menu does not start automatically on start up, you can try fiddeling with your /etc/default/grub file.

Open it with sudo rights:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

And there you should see two entries of importance to us:

GRUB_TIMEOUT= "some number, probably 0 or 5"
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE= hidden/menu/countdown

GRUB_TIMEOUT tells us how long Grub will wait for Input until it loads the default OS.

• 0 will instantly choose the default OS
• -1 will wait on user input indefinitely

GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE tells you how the Grub menu is shown, if at all

• hidden= Hides grub unless you press Shift in time
• menu= Will show Grub
• countdown= Will not show grub, but an actual Countdown on screen

Hope that helped (more info on the other entries in /etc/default/grub Ubuntu Wiki