Blank screen when booting newer live CD images

J

John M. Dlugosz

Guest
I have a NVIDIA 970 graphics card, and when grub2 tries to display a fancy splash screen I get a black screen instead. I can hear the drive chug away etc. but cannot see anything. So, I can't run a new Clonezilla to back up, for example.

I had trouble due to this with my last reboot (after updates) of Mint, and installing openSUSE 13.2 was a nightmare until I figured it out: I was able to give an option on the grub2 parameters when installing, to stay in text mode.

But what about a canned ISO image such as for a liveCD? How can I boot these? I tried drumming on the shift key while it was starting (that should allow editing?), but the last thing I see is an ISOLinux banner, then blackness.

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Edit: I was able to boot CloneZilla to make an all-important backup by digging out an old VGA monitor to plug into the backplane connector, changing the "Don't call it BIOS anymore" Options to enable the on-board graphics and make it primary, hard-power-cycle and wait two minutes while it mulls over the changes, and similarly to put it back to normal before booting the normal system.

So the problem is for sure that the pre-boot code trashes the video card. How can I, in general, escape out of that useless eye-candy that causes such debilitating trouble? I'd like to get past it with a disc that exists, and know how to retouch the iso image to tell it to use text mode.
 
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I am noticing this when after a full install and after every kernel update, the splash screen goes blank. I enter the password to decrypt the drive, and then it's all systems normal. I can't see anything. This seems to be happening with kernel 3.16.38 and above and I am running Mint 17.2. It did the same thing with Ubuntu 14.04. I have to run a script every time there is a kernel update to get the splash screen back. Sounds kernel related to me.
 


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