More breakage -- Sarge only ??

[Uwe Dippel]

I cite myself from Nov-23-2004:

Confirmed here. I cannot reinstall grub (okay, I can, from grub-floppy;
and it tells me 'success'. But when I reboot, the grub menu doesn't come
up; but the kernel is loaded immediately.)
I also notice that the screen is almost unreadable; the characters
completely distorted; some vertical dotted lines are visible; the
characters like 'smear' all over the screen.
No, hold your breath; when X starts everything is fine and okay.
It's getting even stranger: when I boot from grub-floppy, the same
kernel; same commands, everything is fine; the characters are normally
visible while the lines of the boot screen flush by.

As mentioned, all this started with the latest kernel-update (2.6.8) on
Sarge. Also remarkable, I run two almost identical machines, and it only
happened on one (DELL Inspiron 8100).


I didn't get an answer, but now a second machine breaks similarly:

I can boot to OpenBSD on a multi-boot partition, OpenBSD starts, but has 
the same mess of characters, with continuous overwrites to illegible; 
regular vertical strips at pitches of about 8 over the whole screen.

I stress: a very different machine (DELL D400); only common item: grub 
on Debian testing.
To be noted: in the first case the identical same crap-up of the 
characters happen with Debian Linux; here it is OpenBSD. Different 
hardware, different memory.

Identical in both cases: if I boot 'natively'; that is with grub-floppy 
in the first case, everything is fine. In this second case I boot with 
the OpenBSD-CD (36.iso) and enter 'boot wd0a:' and everything is fine as 
well.

The only common item - to repeat - is grub on Testing.

I know, this sounds strange, but somehow something within grub seems to 
mess the console invariably.
I can confirm that in both cases X works fine; and in both cases any 
console (not the x-term, but after exiting the X-session), the console 
will remain completely scrambled up until reboot.

My excuses if this is not a grub-bug; but now everything else is 
different; grub the only common denominator; and in both cases using 
other boot tools boot fine.

Am I really the only one ??

Uwe