Change default on boot

[Andrew Athan]

I am trying to remotely debug a linux kernel problem which causes the 
machine to reboot early in the bootup process.  When this happens, the 
machine goes into an infinite loop attempting to boot.

It would be nice to be be able to override the default menu entry that 
grub boots into, but only for a specified number of boots (or 
unsuccessful boots).  This could be hardcoded at "1".

(Like a poor-man's "last known good" bootup capability )

This would allow safer updates to the boot-loader configurations of 
remote machines, since by setting the count to "1", one could make a 
change and have some chance that if the boot is not successful, the next 
boot will revert to the prior "known good" config.  Differentiation 
between successful and unsuccessful boots, which is really an "extra 
credit" feature, could be signaled by a monotonically incrementing count 
stored within a file in the boot partition.


Or, someone could point me to an existing solution...

Thanks!
Andrew