Ubuntu – How to boot to command-line interface in Ubuntu 16.04

When the PC was designed the sequence was supposed to be:

1. MBR - choose a partition to boot from (the one marked active in the partition table).

2. Boot from that partition.

There are a couple of problems with this on your machine:

1. Windows is a bit rubbish at choosing which partition to boot from. As such both Windows XP and Windows 7 are trying to boot from the Windows 7 partition. The XP boot files should be copied from the Windows 7 partition to the Windows XP partition.

2. GRUB does not follow the standard, ignoring active partitions.

I would try to get each operating system booting from its own partition, then set up Grub so that you have a nice menu for choosing which partition to boot from. To solve your problem I think you will have to:

1. Mark the Windows XP partition as active (using disk management or fdisk on your live CD).

2. Run the fixboot and fixmbr commands from Windows XP CD. Ensure there are now boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr files in the root folder of this partition.

   You should now have XP booting nicely.

3. Mark the Windows 7 partition as active.

4. Run the Windows 7 boot recovery stuff from the Windows 7 CD.

   Windows 7 should pick up XP this time (or it may not because of having sda3 as the extended partition and sda4 after it - don't worry about it).

5. Use the Ubuntu CD to install Grub on /(sda1). This ensures that any further messing about with Windows does not necessitate overwriting Grub.

6. While still on the Live CD, use fdisk to mark sda1 as active.

You can now boot into Ubuntu and sort out menu.lst

Or use EasyBCD.

Simple - just do systemctl set-default multi-user.target to change.

If you ever want to go back to graphical mode then you can do that with systemctl set-default graphical.target.

You can also switch temporarily using systemctl isolate followed by the name of the target you want to switch to, but set-default will change the target it boots to by default.