No recovery/single user mode! Cursor key in recovery menu starts splash screen

[Matthias Czapla]

Binary package hint: plymouth

I can no longer boot into recovery mode a.k.a. single user mode. The "Recovery Menu" appears where I want to "Drop to root shell prompt without networking". But when I hit the cursor down key it immediately shows the plymouth splash screen and I can no longer see the Recovery Menu, making it effectively impossible to select the correct menu entry. This happens on two different machines running lucid amd64.

It seems that the splash screen just hides the recovery menu. Pressing Enter seems to select one of the menu entries, although I did not succeed in trying to "blindly" select the root shell entry.

Booting into single user mode did work before, at least on 2010-07-27 when I did the last filesystem dump.

<unrelated rant>
Words can't describe how much I hate this f***ing plymouth. First I had to realize that it's impossible to see *all* boot messages the kernel and init/upstart normally emit. As it seems I'm *forced* to get used to an oh so cute splash screen. Then the endless hassles of making it at least use my screens native resolution. And now I cannot boot my Unix systems into single user mode? And all this for a "flicker free" booting experience? You're kidding.

Oh and I forgot: Documentation? What's that? Use the force, Luke! Or what?
</unrelated rant>

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: plymouth 0.8.2-2ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.41-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Aug 20 17:21:26 2010
DefaultPlymouth: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo/ubuntu-logo.plymouth
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100429)
MachineType: LENOVO 1706GMG
PccardctlIdent:
 Socket 0:
   no product info available
PccardctlStatus:
 Socket 0:
   no card
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=fe567f37-ad02-43fd-9ff7-2dbd3cecef2e ro
ProcFB: 0 inteldrmfb
SourcePackage: plymouth
TextPlymouth: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-text/ubuntu-text.plymouth
dmi.bios.date: 11/20/2008
dmi.bios.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.bios.version: 7BETD7WW (2.18 )
dmi.board.name: 1706GMG
dmi.board.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.board.version: Not Available
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: No Asset Information
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.chassis.version: Not Available
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnLENOVO:bvr7BETD7WW(2.18):bd11/20/2008:svnLENOVO:pn1706GMG:pvrThinkPadX60:rvnLENOVO:rn1706GMG:rvrNotAvailable:cvnLENOVO:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
dmi.product.name: 1706GMG
dmi.product.version: ThinkPad X60
dmi.sys.vendor: LENOVO

[Matthias Czapla (dermatsch)]

Correction: the splash screen does *not* just hide the recovery menu. I did some more tests and the behavior is very inconsistent. Sometimes hitting the cursor key multiple times does bring the recovery menu back but it hangs and does not respond to any key press. Other times it just kept showing the splash with or w/o the animated dots. I dropped to a root shell once, but there were no newlines output to the screen and only every second keypress got through (typing "abcdefgh" resulted in "bdfh: command not found"). Weird.

[Matthias Czapla (dermatsch)]

There is at least one other user that experienced the same problem:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1508326

[dino99 (9d9)]

That version has died long ago; no more supported