Fedora 17 – “Cannot Display This Video Mode”

Posted: August 22nd, 2012 | Author: karol | Filed under: Linux | Comments Off on Fedora 17 – “Cannot Display This Video Mode”

When attempting to install Fedora 17 on Sun Fire X4200 server, the following message displayed on the attached monitor:

Cannot Display This Video Mode

I tried a couple of different Dell monitors (both about 4-5 years old) with the same result. Fedora installation was available in text mode only. Unfortunately some of the options, such as custom disk partitioning, are available only during graphical (GUI) installation mode.

The following combination of boot parameters have done the trick to display GUI installation:

nomodeset xdriver=vesa resolution=800x600

Unfortunately, after successful installation, I faced the same problem again – the monitor was not able to display Grub startup screen nor Fedora’s console. The message “Cannot Display This Video Mode” was shown on the attached monitor again.

Since network was not configured during installation, there was no remote access via ssh to the system. To solve the problem, I booted Knoppix and made the following changes in the file /boot/grub2/grub.cfg:

In the segment that starts with

function load_video

the line

insmod vga

was changed to

insmod vga-758

In the segment that starts with

if loadfont $font

the line

set gfxmode = auto

was changed to

set gfxmode = 800x600

In kernel boot options (lines that start with “linux /vmlinux…..”), option

vga-758

was appended to the list.

(In my case, “nomodeset” was already present in the list of kernel boot options. It may need to be added  if you do not see it there.)

After the above changes, grub startup screen and Fedora console display fine on the attached monitor.

 

Modified grub.cfg file can be seen here

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