Garbled text during startup.

Hi all..

Not exactly a Linux noob and I know I should be able to figure this one out and sort it. But for the life of me I can't!

Am fairly new to Zorin, and only use it on one machine atm, which is an old Toshiba Portege M200. Generally it works well and looks great, however..

Recently it's started taking 2-3 attempts to get it to boot, each time it fails it stops in text mode with some prompt on screen. Problem with that is the text is not readable. I suspect it's standard ASCII but the codepage/font/whatever it's called these days is not one that my system is rendering correctly. How do I change this to something I can read?

Once I am able to read what it says, then I'll be able to deal with whatever is stopping the boot.

Thanks in advance.

(If necessary I'll be able to provide a screenshot of what is going on, but not for a couple of days)

Hi and welcome,

see here:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2247

and run the part about "dpkg" in the "Broken Files" section.

Let us know how you get on.

Regards Wolfman

No broken packages reported under Synaptic or Aptitude. dpkg... just returns to the prompt immediately.

I cannot use recovery mode as the text is unreadable. Used to be fine.

Have you removed your splash screen?

In terminal, when you give

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

what does it say next to the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" ? (within the "" brackets)

madvinegar wrote:Have you removed your splash screen?

No, but it isn't there.

In terminal, when you give

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

what does it say next to the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" ? (within the "" brackets)

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Just tried recovery mode. Last readable text is the "loading initrd" line. Everything after that is garbled. I get intermittent boots - usually it stops at (maybe) some prompt, after a variable number of reboots it'll start OK.

Would like this to be reliable as I'm trying to sell the boss on doing Linux installs for some of our customers.

Hi,

have you tried booting a live CD and is the result the same with garbled text??. Have you checked your graphics card connection to see if it is a loose cable??.

Regards Wolfman

Kiwi Rider wrote:

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Try replacing "quiet splash" with "nomodeset". Save and exit.
Then in terminal run

Code:

sudo update-grub

Reboot and see if that helps.