Description

I was playing with grub settings to see if I could boot Ubuntu 10.04 desktop into terminal mode. I added “text” option to grub’s option as  “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash text”. What I got was a blank black screen. I had to recovery for this error through recover mode.

What to do

You can force Ubuntu to show menu options if you hit the right key when you see the message:

Grub loading

With Ubuntu 9.04 or older, the key is “ESC” key.  With newer version, the key is left “Shift” key.

To remove the “Text” option

I selected option 0 – “Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-46-generic” and pushed “e” to edit the commands. Then I removed “text” at end of line “Linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-46-generic root=….. ro splash text”. This solved the blank black screen problem.  Then I could modify the grub menu properly.

Reference

Ubuntu Wiki Recovery Mode