Why won't the GRUB menu appear after a fresh server install?

Question

I recently applied a fresh install of 11.10 server, and when the GRUB menu should appear on boot, my monitor says it doesn't support the current input timing. This is an LCD monitor, and I get a similar error on an older LCD monitor. Here are the uncommented lines in my /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMOUT=1 # changed to try getting the menu to appear
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=false # same
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 # changed from 2
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

After making the changes above, I ran update-grub which said it worked.

My motherboard is an ASRock N68-S board with GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a chipset.

If I don't press anything during this time, the kernel will boot and I'll get to a login prompt, however it's a problem because it hangs at this point once I get mdadm installed and my RAID drives connected. If I could see what's going on maybe it will help me diagnose that problem.

I have the exact same problem with a fresh install of 11.10 desktop; the login and desktop UI work fine, it's just when the GRUB menu should show up that I get nothing.

Answer 1

Your video card does not like your monitor enough to send it a signal it likes durign that time on its own, so you'll need to edit /etc/grub.d/00_header and tell it what to do.

In that file search for gfxmode=auto and change it to something like gfxmode=1024x768. If you don't feel comfortable doing it, you can use StartUp Manager https://help.ubuntu.com/community/StartUpManager to make the change.