Comment 23 for bug 447765

@cazacugmihai: I can now switch to a tty console on my XPS M1530 after reinstalling grub2 completely (ie installing grub1 and then reinstalling grub2). The differences I can see between our configurations is that GRUB_GFXMODE is commented out in my /etc/default/grub, and grub.cfg has no 'set gfxpayload=keep' line:

if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then
  set gfxmode=640x480
  insmod gfxterm
  insmod vbe
  if terminal_output gfxterm ; then true ; else
    # For backward compatibility with versions of terminal.mod that don't
    # understand terminal_output
    terminal gfxterm
  fi
fi

I'm pretty sure when I couldn't switch to a tty console I had GRUB_GFXMODE set. Does it make a difference if you comment GFXMODE out and run update-grub?