On initial powerup of the machine here, after the BIOS and POST things
are done with, GRUB loads up with its usual selection of boot choices.
The default choice is this one (from GRUB’s menu.lst file):
Normally, this works fine. The problem is if I boot the machine with my
external USB disk attached. I have a Seagate 1TB FreeAgent
(ST310005FDA2E1-RK) here being used as a backup device. If I cold boot
the machine with this attached to the USB port, GRUB loads the same, but
when the kernel loads, I’m presented with an error screen saying that VGA
mode 0x317 is not valid and asking me to specify a valid mode or wait 30
seconds.
This is somewhat annoying, and doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why would
having a disk connected on USB change anything to do with valid VGA video
modes for the kernel?
OpenSUSE-11.2 is supposed to have superior USB device handling, in part because of the newer 2.6.31 kernel (as opposed to 2.6.27 in 11.1). It will be interesting to read if this problem is reported as solved by the 11.1 users if they update to 11.2.