There is some information in this wiki, which is quite useful in setting up a custom splash screen, which may be relevant to this thread.
Custom splash screen - openSUSE
I can confirm that the custom splash screens work for openSUSE-11.1, as I setup custom grub splash background on my mother’s older PC (which is running 11.1) and I setup a custom openSUSE splash screen (which appears AFTER the grub boot screen) on our family’s new Dell Studio 15 laptop (running openSUSE-11.1).
Hi Global Moderator,
This thread isn’t about setting up a splash screen for openSUSE 11.1. I said at the beginning that after changing menu.lst I lost the background picture. That means I can also confirm it USED to work. It doesn’t now.
This thread is about trying to find out WHY I and other people LOST THEIR GRUB BACKGROUND PICTURE AFTER MODIFYING MENU.LST. This should not have happened.
We did not modify /boot/grub/message
We did not run gfxboot or do anything to try to change the picture.
None of the last replies have been relevant. I understand I can start from scratch and maybe I will have a grub background picture. But WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?
None of the last replies have been relevant. I understand I can start from scratch and maybe I will have a grub background picture. But WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?
It happened because the changes made, pursuant to the alteration of the menu.lst file, had other effects. Specifically, the old message is no longer being referenced. If it were, and it had a valid background image file in its cpio structure, it would display the picture as part of GRUB’s ordinary functioning. But it is not displaying; GRUB is reverting to a text menu. So, we infer, not that the menu.lst file change is a bad one, but that menu.lst is not being executed at all.
The advice to look at the “change your GRUB background pic” checklists is actually spot-on, and the “reinstall GRUB and all its supporting software” activities will get you nowhere.
GRUB plays a simple role, and is straightforward to configure, once you have a mental plan for its interaction with the multiple OSs in your system. It is here that the install process for SuSE falls short of optimum, imo, as it does some nonobvious rearranging of an existing system’s boot logic to favor the most recently installed OS. For you, adding another OS in a perfectly functioning system, it is best to put in a generic GRUB in MBR, and point the boot/root and message values to a known-good partition. Once that is done, the background image in message will appear when desired.
HTH
I understand.
The point of my post was not to give you the answer.
Rather it was to provide more information on how splash screens are changed/saved … and also to note that I did modify the menu.lst and I did change the splash screen on two PCs, and I did NOT have the problem reported.
Hence since I have not had the problem this is not a simple matter of just modifying the menu.lst and having this happen. ie it is NOT a problem that is easy to repeat (which IS important when trying to help solve problems). I had thought that point was intuitively obvious. I see now it was not.
Also, a point re: what users are called … I’m sure it does not irritate you, but it does irritate me. My handle is “oldcpu” and not global moderator. Other than resigning from my volunteer activity, I have no control over my being named “global moderator”. Would you like me to address you as “puzzled penguin”? Even if you do like being called “puzzled penguin”, when I am trying to offer information, I do not like being referred to as “global moderator”. So please, do not address me as “global moderator”. Thank you for your consideration.
Menu.lst is certainly being used or the new OS I added wouldn’t show up on the list.
That doesn’t explain why this happened.
And you certainly succeeded! 
Thank you, I did find all that before I posted here. I also found other posts here and elsewhere noting the same problem and nobody had a solution or defined the cause.
That’s all well and good, but other people besides me did have the same problem.
Well it was certainly a sign of respect that I addressed you by your title, hoping you would see the confusion and off topic replies and just put the thread out of its misery. I certainly had no intention of offending you by noting your position.
Oldcpu I think this thread has been unproductive and if you have in your power to close it then I say thank you.
this thread has been unproductive
I agree that you are not satisfied. And future folks will undoubtedly run across this thread, and conclude that there is some unknown failure mode for GRUB, that manifests itself as a disappearing splash image. Bad, bad, linux programmers and their heisenbugs.
The reality is that GRUB 0.97 has a simple mission profile, that of presenting the user with a list of operating systems, and directing the loading of the one selected. Its use is complicated in practice by allowing the selection of a splash background picture, and further by SuSE’s idiosyncratic use of a message file, that renders much of the net’s GRUB wisdom misleading or just wrong. But, as evidenced by the reports of successful GRUB menu.lst updates, the SuSE-only docs are fine.
As for why exactly any particular GRUB instance is acting out-of-spec, it’s hard to say. My suspicion lies with overly-helpful OS- and GRUB-install programs, and a default behavior of GRUB to present something usable even when some of its desired pieces are missing at boot time.
Suggestion: Take another look at GRUB parameters vs system setup. For instance, does the BIOS boot order match your desired hd0? Does that match the info in /boot/grub/device.map? Does device.map live in the partition that is referenced by menu.lst ? [There may be spurious [i]device.map files in pre-existing / partitions.] Go into the GRUB CLI, look around (“find”). Is there more than one /boot/grub/menu.lst file? device.map? etc.
Properly configured, GRUB does its kernel selection and boot job reliably, and with nice graphics if you supply the picture.
HTH
@randux -
Did you re-install grub immediately after changing menu.lst? That is, did you make the change, reboot and then not see the grub splash, and subsequently reinstall grub?
Did you update the kernel since your last (presumably the first) grub installation?
Have you tested the gfxboot splash separately, as the wiki page describes? Install qemu, and then do:
gfxboot --test --preview -b grub -vm qemu
What other diagnostic steps have you taken?
Addendum to my post just above:
Does your machine by chance have a via cpu?
In your bios setup look for a entry called something like “reserved memory”, “ISA memory”, “memory hole” which has a value of ~15MB. This is a legacy setting that hails back to the ISA days, and if it is enabled then the bootloader including gfxboot which is called by grub stage2 may not fit in memory because it will not be written beyond this reserved space. It is usually harmless to disable it.
I can give you a couple of other suggestions onces you’ve replied to this and my previous post.
… deleted … post not relevant.
I had the same problem caused by reinstalling grub and the menu.lst. It’s simply to solve:
I had the grub-menu on the console with the black background screen with text and I got again the openSUSE graphics green background splash by newly installing the package “grub” and “gfxmenu” from my openSUSE DVD 11.0.
Confirm fix: after you run
grub-install
and\or regenerate initrd you have to reinstall grub (only grub, you may brake deps) and gfxboot to get your fancy bootsplash back