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When I press Ctrl+Alt+F1 in my Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 (Santiago) I get a black screen with a blinking cursor, but I never get a login prompt. I can get back to my desktop with Ctrl+Alt+F7, and things work as normal. However, when I run sudo init 3 I get the same thing, but this time I am stuck at the screen and can't get back without a reboot.

I'm not even sure where to start looking for the cause of this problem. Are the startup scripts that might be causing the problem or other system configurations that could lead to this? If this is not an known issue, what steps should I take to debug?

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  • Video driver. And try the other VTs first.
    – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
    Nov 12, 2013 at 21:25
  • I get the same behavior on all of the VTs. I'm not sure what the video driver is. Is there an easy way to check from the terminal?
    – nispio
    Nov 12, 2013 at 21:28
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    I can't remember exactly the RHEL paths for this stuff, but there should be a path similar to /etc/init. In there should be a config file for each TTY that is meant to be running. (Mine has tty1.conf, tty2.conf, etc.) Check if those are there. Also, run a ps -ef | grep tty and see if there are getty processes currently running. (There should be one or more.)
    – dg99
    Nov 12, 2013 at 22:32

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I found out that the console was being sent to a separate display (which was not plugged in). Once I disabled the second display, the terminal showed up as expected. Thanks for the suggestions.

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