Arch Linux: booting in blind mode UEFI

Question

I recently installed Arch on an old box for someone else, and I'm running into a problem: I am booting to a GRUB shell, and when I manually load the kernel with linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux and initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img, I get a message saying this:

error: no suitable video mode found
Booting in blind mode

It seems that the kernel was loaded, but none of the userspace is displayed. For a few minutes, I am not allowed to use the keyboard in any sort of way, but after the only thing I am able to do is Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot.

I do not know if this is a graphics driver issue, as I'm not too aware of the modes GRUB has. If it is necessary, the graphics card is an ATI/AMD Radeon 6470M HD "Seymour". This issue has never happened on any of my computers running Arch; does anyone know how to get around this?

Answer 1

I went through this with my laptop.

Grub does require you to initialize the display as well as have UEFI support in the kernel that supports display handoff.

Once you do this you should be able to see all of the boot process (at some point during boot the display is initialized and you should be able to see output.)

I don't use the mess of a file that grub2 creates, I wrote my own, which I'll share. It is set up to dual boot linux and windows but will have to be modified for your installation (drive and partitions) so not completely a copy and paste. I also don't bother with an initramfs so you'll have to add that to the linux entry.

timeout=10
default=0

# Declare where the Grub modules are located
set prefix=(hd3,gpt3)/grub

# Load EFI video drivers. This device is EFI so keep the
# video mode while booting the linux kernel.
insmod efi_gop
insmod font
if loadfont ${prefix}/fonts/unicode.pf2
then
        insmod gfxterm
        set gfxmode=auto
        set gfxpayload=keep
        terminal_output gfxterm
fi

# Declare boot entries below this line
menuentry 'Linux' {
        root=hd3,gpt3
        linux /vmlinuz root=PARTUUID=038f0d56-22ed-e346-b243-a86b4abf8410 quiet rootfstype=ext4 net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0
}

menuentry 'Windows 7' {
        root=hd2,gpt2
        chainloader (hd2,gpt2)/EFI/MICROSOFT/BOOT/bootmgfw.efi
}

It is important that that your /boot/grub/fonts/unicode.pf2 file actually exists! You also need to tell grub where the modules are located.