Bugzilla – Bug 244448
GRUB graphical menu partially hangs; text mode works
Last modified: 2008-12-10 08:38:37 UTC
I have an older machine which was just upgraded with a SATA controller and disk. I moved my openSUSE 10.2 installation to the SATA disk, and all is fine except for this. The graphical menu has three problems: -The default selection with timeout does not work. The menu does not hang completely (I can make a selection and boot), but it never boots automatically. -The animated parts get stuck almost immediately. -If I press ESC to drop to text mode, there is a message dialog, and when that is dismissed, it just hangs. When the gfxmenu is disabled entirely, text mode properly boots the default selection with timeout, and the other two problems are irrelevant. So obviously that is a usable workaround. I tried re-installing grub, both by the command line and by YaST, neither helped. Moreover, the behavior exhibited by the 10.2 DVD is even worse. IIRC, it is completely unusable. I have to prevent it from loading the graphical menu at all, which I did by mashing keys (I think F8 is the one that worked).
Created attachment 118487 [details] hwinfo output
Created attachment 118488 [details] dmidecode output
Are you basically saying that the problems started after installing the sata controller?
Yes Steffen, that's correct.
In what way is the DVD unusable? BTW, the key you were looking for is SHIFT. Sorry, it does not look like I can do anything here. I would have to have such a machine here to debug this.
What I meant about the DVD is that the graphical boot screen hangs before even showing the menu (unlike my installation), so I can't boot anything. When it hangs, there is a blue background with curved lines and a white openSUSE logo. Sometimes the word "welcome" appears in various languages before it hangs, but usually not. In this state, the Caps Lock key toggles the keyboard LED, the ESC key has no effect, and Ctrl+Alt+Del causes a reboot. By holding down the SHIFT key while the DVD loads, and answering no the question of whether to use the graphical boot screen, I can use the DVD's text-mode menu to boot. Even the graphical installer can be launched successfully in this manner.
It sounds a bit like bug 166930, unfortunately that one wasn't really resolved either. :-(
I just had the idea to try out some other Linux Live CD's. Sure enough, the openSUSE 10.1 "Eval" install DVD worked fine. Presumably grub hasn't changed that much since then? If that still doesn't give you enough to go on, I'm willing to try building grub with or without certain patches to identify the offending code.
Unfortunately, the code changed substantially. Not of grub itself but the graphics code.
Gotcha. Well, for what it's worth, the offending PCI SATA card is a Rosewill RC-209 with Silicon Image Sil3114 chipset. Maybe you can get your hands on one at some point. It only costs about $20 retail, which is insignificant compared to the cost of paying people to investigate, develop, and test a fix. Thanks for your attention, anyway.
abandoned bug