Comment # 4 on bug 1002875 from Neil Rickert

Have you tried hitting CTRL-ALT-F7 during boot (after kernel and initrd have
loaded)?

I have to do that if I want the plymouth splash screen to show up.  And since I
use an encrypted LVM, I need it to show up for entering the encryption key.

Maybe boot will be too fast with the SSD.  But at least give that a try on your
system with a traditional hard drive.