[arch-general] unreadable characters login screen after install

[niya levi]

> Just to check, does "locale -c charmap" return UTF-8? If yes, then it seems
> there is an issue with your default console font (I assume you didn't put
> anything like this on the kernel command line). So, try changing the console
> font either by the kernel cmdline or at runtime in a tty console:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts#Console_fonts .
>
> Also, what is your graphics card, and how do you load the graphics driver
> (automatically, early in ramdisk via MODULES= in mkinitcpio.conf, etc.)? Try
> booting with nomodeset at the kernel cmdline to disable KMS and see if your
> fonts get back to normal...
>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Leonid Isaev

locale -c charmap" returns
lc_ctype
UTF-8

my graphics card is a cirrus logic cl-gd5436 pci 1mb vga card
it's loaded automatically,
have tried adding nomodeset by
pressing e at the boot screen with brings me to grub startup file
i added nomodeset to the end of the 'linux     /boot/vmlinux' line
but no change.
i got further by  pressing e at boot and changing the
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX to GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text
and the console screen displayed correctly,
to make it permenant i edited /etc/default/grub and also changed the
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX line there
but upon reboot i was back to the previous block characters.
so i can get a correct display if i press e and edit from there on each
bootup,
is there another entry i should have comment , uncommented or added in
/etc/default/grub to make it permenant ?
shadrock