Description of problem: The grub splashscreen with the menu does not show but a empty black screen with a cursor blinking in the upper left corner is shown instead (home position). When the timeout hits the text on the screen is completely corrupted and the kernel boot messages are illegible. As soon as the kernel jumps to init however the videomode switches and the text gets restored. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): grub-0.93-4 How reproducible: Always on this hardware. Additional info: Commenting out the splashscreen line in /etc/grub.conf is a workaround as the graphical bootmenu is not displayed and the videomode gets not switched into b0rken mode. The videoadapter is an older 16bit ISA card from Video Seven. Model 1024I Plus.
Created attachment 90334 [details] Photo of corrupted kernel messages
Comment on attachment 90334 [details] Photo of corrupted kernel messages Sorry, wrong picture
Created attachment 90336 [details] Picture of corrupted text correct picture this time
Unfortunately, I'm guessing that your video adapter just doesn't properly support vga16. And fixing things like this for ancient video cards that aren't really supported isn't likely to happen (although patches would be accepted). Workaround is to just comment out the splashimage directive in grub.conf.