One additional point. When I installed beowulf on the box with the
GT1030 card, the display was fine. It was only when I upgraded to
chimaera that the problem started. Don't know if firmware-misc-nonfree
is installed by default in beowulf and then removed by the chimaera
upgrade - at some point, I'll try this.

On Tue, 2022-02-15 at 10:27 +0000, Peter Duffy wrote:
> I wasn't quite there!
>
> The upgrade to grub 2.06 fixed the boot problem - but when I booted into
> chimaera, it came up with a major graphics problem - 640x480 display, no
> tty sessions available, and /dev/dri and /dev/fb0 didn't exist: messages
> in /var/log/Xorg.0.log saying that the framebuffer couldn't be created.
> Graphics driver is nouveau: I considered trying NVidia's own driver, but
> I couldn't even boot into rescue mode - the boot sequence never reached
> the command prompt!
>
> I mentioned that I have two identical boxes on which I'm working these
> problems. Hardware is ASUS H310M motherboard; Intel i5-9600K (6-core);
> 16g RAM. (It's strange that I've got the two boxes: I accidentally
> bought two lots of this kit, and decided to keep the second set as
> spares - I then decided to use them to upgrade the old box. Am I ever
> glad that I did so ...)
>
> However, the two boxes are not quite identical - one has NVidia GT610
> (bought in 2013), the other has an NVidia GT1030 (bought this year).
> After upgrading beowulf to chimaera and upgrading to grub 2.06, the
> chimaera installation on the box with the old NV card worked fine. It
> was the one with the new NV card where the graphics borked.
>
> I swapped the primary disks between the two boxes. The problem was still
> on the box with the new NV card.
>
> I did some googling and fortunately found a post which gave me the
> solution. I had to install firmware-misc-nonfree. After this, the
> graphics were fine on both boxes. Interesting that the new card required
> firmware, whereas the old one didn't.
>
> Why NVidia rather than Radeon? I've tried both over the years - but I've
> stuck with NV because I just find that the "look" seems to be better -
> the display usually seems more solid (less perceptible flicker), the
> colours seem clearer, and (especially) the fonts seem more readable.
>
> On Mon, 2022-02-14 at 18:23 +0000, Peter Duffy wrote:
>
> > That fixed the problem! All three systems - chimaera, win7 and CentOS -
> > now boot successfully.
>
>
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