HDMItoVGASetup

In order to use my RPI on an old VGA monitor, I bought one of these [1].

Connection is straight forward but when booting the RPI after a vanilla install of Raspian the display didn't register and I couldn't get to the terminal.

Externally Edit Config.txt

The following assumes a vanilla flash of the SD card with no display working and no means of remote connection to the RPi [SSH or rdesktop]

1. Power down the RPi
2. Remove the SD card from your RPi
3. Install the card in your SD card reader on another computer (this can be the same computer you used to flash the card in the first place).
4. Mount the sd card, If using a graphical desktop the SD card should appear as a link on the Desktop or in the filemanager (windows)
5. Open the file 'config.txt' in your favourite editor, its in the root of the smaller partition.
6. uncomment #hdmi_force_hotplug=1 by removing the '#' at the beginning of the line
7. save the text file
8. unmount the SD card
9. reinstall in the RPi and power the RPi. You should get the terminal screen.

Edit via SSH

1. Connect to your RPi via your prefered remote access method.
2. edit 'config.txt' found at /config.txt as described above.

References

1. HDMI to VGA converter
2. RPiconfig elinux