We are a step further. I changed the partitioning so that the new and bigger core.img of GRUB fits on the disk. I manually selected the boot device because the drive enumeration changed with the new kernel. All is good. The system is installed and boots….
But all I got is a blank screen and a bunch of hard disk led’s that are working overtime. So I thought it might be a problem with the syncing of the newly created RAID. Time to take a nap…
After the nap and some other things, I returned and still all is black. But the keyboard reacts to Num Lock changes and it seems alive. Just no video. So the framebuffer hit me again. Why is that used by default anyways? Lets switch it off.
That sounds easy and it is. Just restart and in the GRUB menu screen hit e for edit the entry of Ubuntu. You get a nice EMACS style editor where you can remove the line that says:
gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode
After the change press F10 to boot the modified entry.
In my case I could see that one of my RAID’s was in degraded mode and the system was waiting for input. I really don’t understand why we are not in text mode here or why the framebuffer is not able to show this information. Anywhoo, I am now fixing my RAID and hope this information might help others.