What is a good grub basic video command to boot a external SATA hard drive when it is connected by USB to a different computer than the Linux was installed with ? I have Fedora 9, with it's grub installed on the master boot record of that external hard drive, but I use a main grub that is installed on my internal hard drive normally to boot all 5 Linux and XP. Is it like this; x11failsafe and vga=some value, which is used in the fail safe mode of Open SUSE ? The Ubuntu uses; recovery mode which may have basic video included also ? I have nvidia video card drivers now installed in all my 5 Linux, so when booting that external HD with a PC that has different hardware, will it have the basic video device drivers?

the most basic would be:
vga=normal

Possible VGA modes:

Normal VGA console: vga=normal
VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x64k: vga=791
VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x32k: vga=790
VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x256: vga=773
VESA framebuffer console @ 800x600x64k: vga=788
VESA framebuffer console @ 800x600x32k: vga=787
VESA framebuffer console @ 800x600x256: vga=771
VESA framebuffer console @ 640x480x64k: vga=785
VESA framebuffer console @ 640x480x32k: vga=784
VESA framebuffer console @ 640x480x256: vga=769

I will try that vga=normal then thanks, but I just attempted to boot to my external SATA hard drive connected as USB using my boot menu F10 key, to select that drive, (listed as USB HDD), into both Fedora 9 and the PCLinuxOS, which both failed. This may be caused by the Linux installs all were done when connected by eSATA, so that the external hard drive is as; /dev/sda and the internal IDE drive is seen as; /dev/sdb , which then does cause problems during the boot up with the mounted partitions in my file; /etc/fstab. Fedora error was; "error mounting /dev/whatever, no such file or directory". And PCLinux boot error was; it hung on starting Udev: /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, and hung on; INIT entering run level: 5. So it is needed then to make a backup of my fstab file, then edit it just for to enable booting when connected by USB, or do I need to do other items as well to make this work ? Thanks.