pk stuff

I had to make a few changes to /etc/default/grub to get Ubuntu 14.04 to boot with a working console. Initially, my monitor just went dark.

Changes with reasons:

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT: if you want to see the Grub menu, this must be commented out.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX: allows passing parameters to the linux startup command. Newer kernels (>3.5? or so) reinitialize the graphics card. My AMD Radeon something-or-other didn’t like this at all. nomodeset forces linux to use/keep BIOS graphics settings.

GRUB_GFXMODE: select resolution for Grub graphical starup. 1280×1024 works on my aging ViewSonic. This setting is for the Grub menu.

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX: specifying keep, causes Grub to keep using the previous resolution (from GRUB_GFXMODE) for the rest of the boot. 

NB: after making any changes, remember to update-grub (or nothing will happen).

Contents of my /etc/default/grub after making required changes:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
# info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”splash”
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”nomodeset”
# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD …)
#GRUB_BADRAM=”0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef”

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo’
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640×480
GRUB_GFXMODE=1280×1024
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

# Uncomment if you don’t want GRUB to pass “root=UUID=xxx” parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY=”true”

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE=”480 440 1″

The SystemRescueCd has all sorts of useful tools to restore ailing Linux systems.
Check it out at: https://www.sysresccd.org

I recently replaced the RAID 1 drives in my CentOS 5 box and had to reinstall the grub MBR. As the drives are a couple of TB each, I thought I’d try GPT instead of the old MBR partitioning, since soon all drives will exceed MBR’s 2TB limit. Luckily GPT is baked into RH/CentOS kernels (unlike many others).
Restoring the MBR was trickier than I expected and I made a couple of mistakes along the way – wish I had found the following description sooner:
https://idolinux.blogspot.com/2009/07/reinstall-grub-bootloader-on-md0.html

In a nutshell run grub interactively and do the following:

# grub
grub> root (hd0,0)        
root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
grub> setup (hd0)
setup (hd0)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
 Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf"... succeeded
Done.
grub> quit
# reboot