Recovery menu cannot be controlled with keyboard

I agree that having a root shell be the default makes sense.

The man page for whiptail says that you can "move between the menu entries by pressing the UP/DOWN keys, the first letter of the tag as a hot-key.". So if you press the r key twice and then hit enter you will get a root shell.

To make this more obvious you could change the menu entries to something like "(R)oot Drop to root shell prompt" or "2 Drop to root shell prompt".

Lars, unfortunally neither up/down keys nor "hot-key" runs for me :-(

The combination of this bug and #122948 (can't use sudo after configuring network) basically means I have a brand new Ubuntu install that is completely hosed. Please fix one of these bugs!

Does this only happen inside kvm/qemu? Or was this seen on real hardware as well?

Michael, on real hardware as well.

@marco: on what specific hardware have you seen this issue? What video card is installed and how is the keyboard connected (standard ps2 or usb?).

Michael, my hardware is an Acer laptop (aspire 5920) with an integrated graphics controller INTEL Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 (the driver module loaded by the system is i915).

updating 8.04 to 8.10 with xubuntu on msi laptop and kernel 2.6.27-4 no problems with recoverymenu!

The fix is released for Intrepid but what about Hardy?

Still an issue on Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 (with a Dell Latitude D530) when altering the non-recovery mode boot option to suffix the word "single" on the end of the loading. This works fine when I go to "recovery mode" directly, but I really expected appending "single" to the end of that string to simply dump me in a root shell as if I had entered "root" from the Recovery Menu (but without anywhere near so much stuff loading beforehand).

Still occurs in Jaunty 32bit (VirtualBox) and Karmic Alpha-4 (real hardware, PS2 keyboard). I boot the livecd, press F6 add single, boot, and then nothing works. I can type RR and it seems as though it selects the rootshell, but pressing Enter doesn't do anything, I am still in whiptail and can still select menu items.

Pressing Cntl-C quits whiptail, but instead of giving me a root shell it just starts normally or complains that init has been terminated. Would it be possible to at least trap the Ctrl-C and cause it to give me a root shell?

Also whiptail seems to work fine once the computer has booted, even under linuxterms. Does Ubuntu configure the linuxterm keyboard during boot? If so, maybe should be done before whiptail is started? Alternatively is it possible to undo this configuration so that I can test whiptail under controlled conditions?

John, I have opened a new bug report (#417859) about the issue related to the recovery menu, after having booted the system with the single kernel option, that cannot be controlled with the keyboard.
The issue described in this bug report (recovery manu that cannot be controlled with the keyboard after having booted the system with the recovery kernel) is fixed.

I experience this problem in the latest Ubuntu 11.10. I can select entries in the grub menu but the recovery menu does not respond to any key press. I use an Apple USB keyboard.

Still an issue for me - Oneiric AMD64 Server. The server CDs are not really live CD's.

Still an issue for me in Xenial (16.04.2 LTS) on a MacBook Pro 5,5.

Trying to recover after a crash, and can't get past the

Welcome to emergency mode!
...[some suggestions]...
Press Enter for maintenance
(or press Control-D to continue):

Stage. No keyboard input accepted whatsoever (although the keyboard work in grub, and allows editing of the boot script).

This is still an issue with bionic. Pressing arrow keys in the friendly-recovery menu will result in [B and [A. Makes it very difficult to fix a broken system.

Still seeing this in Kubuntu 18.04 installs.
Menu does not display, blind selections seem to do nothing or simply restart.
As stated above: this is a system killer if discovered when we actually have a serious problem.
Fortunately in my case I was able to work around it, but it was still terrifying to discover.... half way through 2020

PS: it seems to be entirely ignoring GRUB_GFXMODE / GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX at some point after selecting a 'recovery options' grub-entry. It looks to be reverting to 640x480...maybe relevant.

In case it's useful: at the end of the video, after the text stops scrolling, i press:
r a few times
enter a few times
ctrl-alt-del
/etc/default/grub included (as you can see from the commented lines I have been trying to figure out if thats why it isnt working, because it seems to have broken some time after doing a bunch of resolution tests)

http://oh-hi.info/video/2020-06-04--19-44-58_concatFilter_H264-veryslow.mp4