Black screen

[JonnyTech]

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After installing to a drive from Linux and copying an ISO to the appropriate folder, my computer boots to a black screen. No messages, menu or other display at all. Secure boot is disabled. Other removable drives boot without issue. Can anyone suggest any troubleshooting tips?

[Mexit]

How about secure boot enabled?

Mount the EFI partition (the second one on the drive) and try renaming /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI to something else and /EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi to BOOTX64.EFI and see if it works.

[JonnyTech]

Thanks, I tried booting the drive with secure boot enabled but it still boots to a black screen.

Then in frustration, I hit the enter key a few times and the ISO file that I had in the ISOs folder started to boot.

So I disabled secure boot, booted to the black screen, hit enter a few times and the ISO started to boot.

Tried it on my other computer which also booted to a black screen, the enter button trick worked there too.

It seems that MultiOS-USB does indeed work but no menu or text or GUI is displayed.

Any ideas on what could be the issue? There may be more buttons that I can press but I have never seen the display.

[Mexit]

I guess there may be a problem with graphic card Try to boot, press c and type termial_output console and press Enter. What computer did you try to run MultiOS-USB (graphic card) on? I understand the ISO image booted up fine?

[JonnyTech]

I assume that you mean terminal_output console. Great, I got a grub prompt!

Here is the result of videoinfo:

I tried on a Lenovo y500 laptop and a Dell Latitude E5540 laptop. Both with same results.

This is the details from the Lenovo:

$ lspci |grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 650M] (rev a1)

$ lshw -c display
  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: GK107M [GeForce GT 650M]
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: a1
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0
       resources: irq:30 memory:c2000000-c2ffffff memory:b0000000-bfffffff memory:c0000000-c1ffffff ioport:3000(size=128) memory:c3080000-c30fffff

I believe that the Dell has an Intel card but I am away from that computer at the moment.

The ISO did boot without issue, pressing enter those few times took me to its grub boot menu, both text based and graphical were visible fine, so I am not sure why MultiOS-USB grub does not display.

Thanks for the great support so far. Please advise anything else that you would like me to try.

[Mexit]

Currently I cannot access the computer. At the end of the week I will try to update Grub. Can you provide what ISO image you have run? Perhaps it's only a configuration problem

[JonnyTech]

I tried with latest Debian, Ubuntu and Mint. All showed their own grub startup screens once I hit enter but it is just the grub for MultiOS-USB that does not show. Is there any way that I can update grub myself so I can fork this repo then create a PR?

[Mexit]

In that case, the situation is a little different. Grub from MultiOS-USB only loads the configuration from the ISO. It is very possible that this is just a configuration issue. You can try the latest grub version from Ubuntu (grubx64.efi and modules). If you don't have Secure Boot enabled, it shouldn't make much difference.

[JonnyTech]

I replace /binaries/grub-efi-2.04-1ubuntu35/grubx64.efi with a newly downloaded one and reran installer.sh but upon booting it displayed a generic grub menu:

But at least I am now getting a display when booting the drive :)

[Mexit]

Can you try with this version?

[JonnyTech]

Sorry, still blank black screen, pressing enter three times starts the grub loader for the .iso on the drive. There are no errors when creating the drive:

$ sudo ./installer.sh /dev/sdb 128G -fs ext2
[sudo] password for user:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++   Are you sure you want to use /dev/sdb ?   ++
++   THIS WILL DELETE ALL DATA ON THE DEVICE   ++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Are you sure? Type "YeS" to continue: YeS

GPT data structures destroyed! You may now partition the disk using fdisk or
other utilities.
Creating new GPT entries.
Setting name!
partNum is 0
The operation has completed successfully.
Setting name!
partNum is 1
The operation has completed successfully.
Setting name!
partNum is 2
The operation has completed successfully.
/dev/sdb2: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000052 (vfat): 46 41 54 33 32 20 20 20
/dev/sdb2: 1 byte was erased at offset 0x00000000 (vfat): eb
/dev/sdb2: 2 bytes were erased at offset 0x000001fe (vfat): 55 aa
/dev/sdb3: 2 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000438 (ext2): 53 ef
mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
mke2fs 1.44.5 (15-Dec-2018)
Creating filesystem with 33554432 4k blocks and 8388608 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 401151b7-330b-4e6d-8da5-3ba38ddef506
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
	4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.
Copying files...
MultiOS-USB has been successfully installed.

[Mexit]

I have run tests on several computers and everything is displayed correctly. You could try to comment (with #) on lines 48 and 49 in /boot_MultiOS/config/grub.config If nothing changes then lines 30-32 and 39-40 remain.

[JonnyTech]

Sorry, have not time to do the tests. To clarify, shall I comment the lines then re-run the installer, or edit the config file on the usb drive after installation?

[JonnyTech]

Yay! This worked:

if loadfont (*,gpt2)/grub*/fonts/unicode.pf2 ; then
	if keystatus --shift ; then true ; else
#		if [ "${grub_platform}" == "efi" ]; then
#			set gfxmode=auto
#			insmod efi_gop
#			insmod efi_uga
#		else
			insmod vbe
			insmod vga
			set gfxmode="1280x800;1280x720;1024x768;auto"
			set gfxpayload="3200x1800;2560x1440;2160x1440;1920x1080;1600x1200;1600x1050;1600x900;1440x900;1366x768;1280x1024;1280x800;1280x720;1024x768;auto"
#		fi
		insmod gfxterm
		insmod gfxmenu
		export gfxmode gfxpayload
		terminal_output gfxterm
	fi
fi

[Mexit]

Can you check if everything is working properly this time? As of v0.7.0, the bootloader is based on pure GRUB 2.12.

[JonnyTech]

Great work @Mexit - it works! Thank you so very much. In the coming days / weeks, I shall test further and report any issues encountered.