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My Ubuntu server crashed and after recovering with fsck, the server starts with a prompt:

error: invalid video mode specification `text'.
Booting in blind mode.

There is no further echo of my inputs. However, the recovery mode seems to work perfectly.

I tried to do a grub-install and grub-update, which didn't work. Anyone knows how to fix this?

peidaqi
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  • I actually read that one before posting. It's a different problem. I now have it solved. It's a very strange one and I tend to think its linked to some bugs with grub. – peidaqi Aug 01 '18 at 02:27

1 Answers1

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This is a very weird problem. I solved it by manually changing the 

gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode

line in /boot/grub/grub.cfg to:

gfxmode auto

after reboot, the console is now able to show the startup message, and for me to find where the real issue is. It turned out that one of my auto mount in fstab has some issues with the journal index. After running fsck from a live cd the system now starts flawlessly.

But this leads to two more questions:

  1. Why would an automount in fstab crash the entire startup sequence? The volume is for external data and non-essential to the system.
  2. Why there is no display due to this issue? After fixing the volume, I ran grub-mkconfig again and the line was restored to $linux_gfx_mode, and the system runs fine. It feels to me like some bug in grub where the video mode string was not correctly passed to kernel on startup issues. But guess only grub developers could tell.
peidaqi
  • 101