[SOLVED] How I got rid of the "undefined video 31a" screen

[jamesbyron]

When I would boot Intrepid, I would get this screen saying I had an undefined video 31a. I would have to either choose a video resolution or press space to continue. No big deal but annoying nevertheless. I got the solution off the internet but it was incomplete. It dealt with editing the menu.lst file but did not explain how to do that. Here's step by step instructions to fix the problem.

Open a terminal window from Applications/Accessories/Terminal

first backup menu.lst. Copy and paste (or drag) this to the terminal window:

sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst-backup

next edit menu.ls Copy and paste (or drag) this to the terminal window:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

menu.lst is now editable.

Search for the words "vga=" . (this should be a number like vga=981 or similar)

change it to vga=normal

save menu.lst

Reboot and you should be good to go!

[D-cat]

change it to vga=normal

Which is the standard 25x80 video mode (640x480 graphics)

If you can make it work, I prefer vga=773 . It's not real high res ( 1024x768 ), but definitely makes better use of your display space in console mode.

Adapted from vesafb.txt:

Kernel VESA mode table ( vga=___ )

       | 640x480  800x600  1024x768 1280x1024
 ------+-------------------------------------
 256 h |  0x301    0x303    0x305    0x307
     d |    769      771      773      775
       |
 32k h |  0x310    0x313    0x316    0x319
     d |    784      787      790      793
       |
 64k h |  0x311    0x314    0x317    0x31A
     d |    785      788      791      794
       |
 16M h |  0x312    0x315    0x318    0x31B
     d |    786      789      792      795

Higher numbers are not part of the kernel spec for VESA modes and thus are not guaranteed to work.

[Agnostie]

Thanks for posting this D-cat, I was having trouble getting the xubuntu progress loading screen to show. I tried all sorts of fixes to get the usplash to show with the progress bar. I added vga=773 to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and it fixed the problem. I've never been so happy to see the mouse logo