Ubuntu 12.04 boot hangs with a black screen before grub menu after upgrade (gma500_gfx driver)

Posted by Eric van der Vlist on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Eric van der Vlist
Published on 2012-05-07T22:08:03Z Indexed on 2012/10/28 5:25 UTC
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I am using Ubuntu on a fit-pc2 specifications and after upgrading from 10.04 to 12.04 I get a black screen at boot time (before displaying the grub menu) and the computer hangs with no disk activity.

I have managed to boot Ubuntu 12.04 on a live USB key but had to add the following boot options to do so:

  • console=tty1 or console=text
  • acpi=off
  • noapic
  • nomodeset

Using boot-repair, I have tried to add these options to /etc/default/grub (see this pastie log for instance) but I haven't been able to fix the black screen issue.

I have tried many other things such as the workarounds mentioned on the web for PSB-GFX_drivers without any success and also to uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console with the result of getting a

No video mode activated

error.

During these tests, I have managed to break /boot/grub/grub.cfg and could then hit grub in command line. This gave me the chance to check that I can boot without problem if I type:

grub> set root=(hd0,1)
grub> linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro acpi=off noapic nomodeset console=tty1
grub> initrd /initrd.img
grub> boot

How can I tell grub to use these options?

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