Debian

Blank screen after upgrading to grub-pc 1.98~20100126-1

As I always shut down my laptop at work during the weekends, but never reboot it during the week, monday is the day I discover that the updates of the previous week have broken my Debian unstable system.

This monday, it didn’t go very far. After displaying the menu in grub-pc, and showing:
Loading initial ramdisk ...
the screen turns blank. But the computer still boots fine, and I was able to ssh into it in order to fix the problem.

It turns out to be a problem that occurs when KMS is enabled. Some information is available from Debian bug reports #567245 and #567393.

Now here’s how to fix this problem. In /etc/grub.d/10_linux find this line (line 68 for me):
set gfxpayload=keep
and change it to:
set gfxpayload=text

And then regenerate your /boot/grub/grub.cfg with this command:
$ sudo update-grub

And finally, you can reboot, and everything should be fine!

speak up

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