It's supposed to force the load of the legacy VESA driver that should be able to operate any card still functional on the planet.

In case it didn't work, 'nomodeset' should save you. The kernel parameters are set inside the '' of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT='quiet splash' ( quiet and splash are boot parameters)Ī parameter worth a shot is i945.modeset=0 that should force it to use the driver for Intel 945 graphics as you said, if you aren't sure about your hardware, boot from a live-cd and write sudo lshw -short in the terminal, then post the result here. Otherwise you can boot from the live-cd and modify the grub file you find in /etc/default. Something that might help is setting the right video kernel parameters at boot. Won't be the latest and greatest version, but should work fine enough until you run the updater. Theoretically the driver should be already there on anything based on Debian.

^Yeah, because installing the Intel tool for drivers is going to be very easy without a working screen.

Force intel graphics driver install