Recovery CD boot produces scrambled screen on Lenovo Z570
Booting build 6571 recovery CD on a Lenovo Ideapad Z570 laptop produces a scrambled screen.
During boot, I eventually get "Please enter <e> to edit kernel command line" which I assume is being produced by Grub 2. I hit "e" and it produces "QUIET" which I assume is the tail end of the command line. I then add an incantation such as "vga=ask" or "vga=0x318" followed by <enter>. On previous machines with scrambled boot screens, "vga=ask" produced readable text allowing me to continue. However, the Lenovo Z570 continues to produce an unreadable mess on the screen. If I overwrite the "QUIET" I get unreadable text that somewhat resembles the normal linux detailed boot screen.
I also tried earlier builds of 2016, 2015, and 2014 with identical results. My build 6571 CD works just fine on a different machine. The laptop has ports for external VGA and HDMI montitors, which also produce scrambled screens. I have NOT built a BartPE boot CD yet, which was going to be my next step.
I thought it might be useful to ask if there was something I was doing wrong or omitting before proceeding. Thanks.
Good idea but that's not the problem. Looking at the BIOS, there are no video card related options of any kind. BIOS is 45CN36WW which is the latest.
The graphics device is an Intel HD Graphics 3000 chip, running at 1366x768. Nothing exotic there.
Incidentally, the grub2 incantations for 1366x768 are:
vga=0x0360 1366x768 (+1408), 8 bits
vga=0x0361 1366x768 (+2752), 16 bits
vga=0x0362 1366x768 (+5504), 24 bits
None of these work or do anything different. Basically, grub2 is not taking the vga=xxxx boot parameters which makes sense because I believe that vga=xxxx is a grub 1 incantation and that grub2 wants something like
gfxpayload=1366x768
which also doesn't work.
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#gfxmode
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#gfxpayload
So, duz Acronis 2016 build 6571 use grub1 or grub2 and is there a boot line that actually works?
You might try the command values shown in the link below:
> You might try the command values shown in the link below:
> https://kb.acronis.com/content/3836
Thanks. That was my original starting point. If you re-read my original questiong, I indicated that I tried vga=ask, vga=0x031, and other values. The problem is that article 3836 was witten for Acronis True Image 2010 and 2011 (see the "applies to" line). Things changed at some point when Linux went from grub1 to grub2. For example, F11 no longer works as described in the article and has been replaced by "hit <e> to edit...". The vga=ask is now vbeinfo. Perhaps it might be useful of Acronis would kindly update the procedure to reflect the current versions?
Meanwhile, I'm still stuck. I've been trying various Linux Live CD's. Some work, some produce grabage on the screen, while others produce a black screen. I'll see if I can find a pattern. However, I can't go back too far because the Z-570 requires a UEFI boot, with no option to disable UEFI in the BIOS. As I vaguely recall, UEFI boot was introduced in Acronis 2014.
So perhaps it's a Linux issue with this particular screen resolution since other Linux Live CD's seem to have mixed results too?
Any chance to try WinPE instead and see if it fairs any better? It should just boot straight into the Acronis recovery environment with default Windows drivers that might work a little better. Perhaps that will at least be a suitable work-a-round in the interim if it does produce a usable display?
Jeff,
I did read your original post, wanted to make sure you had tried the options listed in the link.
I checked on your machine specs, appears that your laptop comes with 2 Graphics capabilities like I suggested. From what I found the machine has Intel HD Graphics 3000 which is integrated into the chipset and also NVIDIA GeForce GT520M 1GB Graphics. I am not sure if the machine supports switchable graphics but many do. This is the feature you need to disable if equiped or, disable the NVIDIA Graphics temporarily while booted to the recovery media and see if that might fix the issue.
If you have an "optimus" setting in the bios, disable it. The way it's supposed to work is that it uses the Intel graphics by default for low-end stuff, but then optimus is supposed to kick in and convert to the NVIDIA graphics when things start rampping up. The idea is to save battery life for the most part, but I've found it to be buggy in several applications. Perhaps you can leave it running in Windows (if no issues there), but disable it for the purpose of booting the Linux recovery media which most likely doesn't have drivers to support the switchable graphics when Optimus is applied.
Usually, Optimus (nvidia) or AMD switchable graphics can be changed in the bios, but this thread suggests it may have been removed as an option in some systems and can only be changed from within Windows.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P-and-W-Series-Mobile/W540-Disabl…
I reproduced this on my Gigabyte motherboard recently. For me, it turned out that when using the embedded graphcis, my new bios allows up to 1024Mb for dedicated graphics. This works fine in Windows and with WinPE, but in Linux, causes a scrambled screen. I moved back down to 512Mb for the embedded graphics in the bios and now I can see the Acronis application in the bootable recovery Linux environment again.