VGA monitor with pi

[Gil]

I recently obtained a VGA monitor to use with my raspberry pi. I purchased a HDMI to VGA converter from CAMAC which said it was suitable for the pi. I used a clean SD card to download a copy of NOOBs. After pressing key 1 (as suggested in the documentation) I obtained a good display. The display continued during the loading of Debian program. I was informed that the os was successfully installed then the screen went blank and I was not able to revive it. Clearly the monitor and the converter are working correctly. It would seem to me (maybe incorrectly) that after installing the program the pi switched to a different video mode. The monitor did not go into power saving mode so I assume it was still receiving some data. How do I tell the pi to use the setup video mode to run programs?

[BMS Doug]

Your HDMI to VGA converter probably isn't telling the Pi that its a valid HDMI device so you will need to force the Pi to output in HDMI mode.

Lots of detail on the HDMI settings can be found here.

[DougieLawson]

Shutdown your PI.

Reboot while holding the [SHIFT] key. That brings up the NOOBS recovery system. The recovery system has a config.txt editor. Add hdmi_force_hotplug=1. Save and reboot normally.