Fix Grub Loader in Mint 13 / 15

Posted on June 29, 2012 by The Guru

I recently added Mint 13 to my former Vista Machine which now also runs Windows 7. Mint seemed to have installed fine and I was able to run the MDN ProfileManager for Firefox (still having issues getting it to work for
Thunderbird, but not that big of a deal). Everything seemed fine until one night my wireless internet adapter was giving me troubles on my main Windows 7 machine. Since Linux does not support most wireless adapters I was going to boot into Windows on the other machine and see if I could get the adapter to work on that machine. I powered on the machine and my monitor displayed a firmware error: Resolution Out of Range. I tried another monitor and discover the refresh rate was what was ‘out of range’.
I pressed enter and was able to boot into Mint. After the process of elimination involving pressing the down arrow key a given number of times then pressing enter I was finally able to boot into Windows 7. The adapter was working on that computer either but had been prior to me moving it into the same room as my router. While my main Windows 7 machine is also in the same room, the NIC card has issues and will no longer work with a wired connection. I was going to return the adapter in the morning, but decided to re-install the software just to see if that might help. The system had crashed earlier in the day as a result of a BSOD, but the adapter had been working fine up until a few hours later. Reinstalled the software and reboot and Windows found my wireless network and was able to connect.
So, with that resolved I now needed to find out why I couldn’t see the Grub screen when I booted. I posted this issue tomy co-author Gareon (may be we should call him the Linux Guru) in Go Firefox! and after some hunting around he pointed me in the right direction and I found (though I can not find the source any more) a solution in one of the Linux foruns. The grub file needs to be modified as to disable the graphical terminal. The directions below should work (though Gareon did have to change the editor for nano to kate):

Login to your LXDE, then open a terminal and run:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Find the following line of text, and remove the # in front of it:
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console
Save and close the file (Ctrl+O, Ctrl+X), and then run:
sudo update-grub2
This should make GRUB be able to display again.

After rebooting I had the Grub Boot Loader again. This seems to be a common issue with Mint 13 and other newer Linux distros using the analog (VGA) input. Doesn’t appear to be affecting users using HDMI or DVI inputs. Can’t really test this as the machine (as well as this monitor) only have VGA connections. Last summer when I was running Mint I was using this machine when it still had Vista on it along with a monitor with multiple inputs. I was using HDMI connection for my Windows 7 machine and the standard VGA connection for the Vista/Linux machine and everything worked fine. I don’t recall which version of Mint I was running at that time and that install was nuked when I wiped the hard drive this past spring to put Windows 7 on there.