ThinkWiki - User contributions [en]

Talk:Problem with garbled screen

2006-06-24T21:53:17Z

Ik4qix:

Got an A30 with this problem, don't know what GFX card it has. None of these things seems to help. But a clean reinstall will make it useable during the first boot, during that boot everything runs perfect, after a reboot the screen gets messed up and it can't boot windows in anything but Failsafe mode. Sadly i can't get it fixed under the warrenty as it is 3-4 years old.

Jan 18, 2006 - Me too
Just finished a day of working on an A30 with the garbled display problem. Ours boots to the IBM splash screen, but has blue vertical lines running across the screen. When booting to safe mode or to any text mode or utility, the display is responsive (i.e. can navigate using arrow keys, select choices, etc.) but is garbled much like the pictures in the main article of the LILO boot loader screen. The 'garbling' is consistent, and it appears that every other character in the character set gets substituted by the character one value higher than it in the set. For example, capital 'A' displays fine, but capital 'B' get substituted with capital 'C'. 'C' is also fine, but 'D' is substituted with 'E', and so on. The lowercase set corresponds to this pattern exactly as well. As such, the display can be deciphered, but is practically unusable in text mode. When Windows loads, however, everything looks normal. The only Windows-related problem is our inability to load the ATI Radeon driver - the system will not load the GUI with it installed, but will work normally with the generic Windows VGA driver.

Just to be thorough, I did flash the system BIOS and embedded controller software with latest versions, with no change in the display problem.

I attempted to reseat the video connector, but had no luck. Best price I found on a replacement system board was US$279.00, but I haven't decided whether or not to repair it yet.

 June 1, 2006 - Here's what happens to me. 
Since a few monthes, I also get the blue thick lines running accross the screen, but only if I enter the BIOS setup utility. In my experience there is no relation between the strange "features" shown by my laptop and the PC temperature, but it is much more likely that the screen becomes completely unusable if it is hot. 

"Normally" in X I have thin light blue lines that run across the windows and move with it until I resize the window or cover it with a just opened window. In that case the part of the "dirty" window that was covered by the "clean" window becomes "clean"...at least until you move it again. If I move the window very fast it becomes completely light blue. It's like if the driver (or the hardware) could not refresh properly the windows. Take a look at [http://www.maurocremonini.it/thinkpad_jun012006.jpg this screenshot]. 

Are we all sure that we are facing an actual hardware problem? Has anybody ever tried to run X by just using the generic VGA driver? I gather from the previous post that MS-Windows does not show problems in that case. I would try myself, but I do not know how to change the driver for X! 

 June 16, 2006 - This is my experience with this problem:
I have always had a feeling I have this problem since I tried once to install Fedora Linux on my portable. When initializing the graphical desktop, the phenomenon started.

When I install Windows 2000, except for the first installation stage, than I have a garbaged screen, everything works fine. I can have my full resolution, but, as described above, I can't install the display driver tools. Also, watching video's isn't smooth because it is disrupted by vertical blue or purple lines.

Installing Windows XP is not possible, I only get a resolution of 640x480 8 bit color, when I change the resolution to more colors or more pixels, I only get a blank screen (but you can see the backlight is lit)

I already dissasambled en reassambled my whole portable, checked connectors and so on... but never had any luck.

Also, when going into the BIOS, the inverted screen (gray with blue letters) is normal, but above and below there are blue lines.

Take also a look at this [http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=8315359#post8315359 discussion and screenshot]. 

I hope we can find more people with this problem and mybe a solution?

 June 21, 2006 - An update:
It is very funny (er...) that when I switch from 24 to 16 bit colour depth the vertical blue lines I was talking about above turn yellow!!! The problem is now not as big as it was some days ago and I think it is related to 3D direct rendering I managed to enable a few days ago. There must be also an issue with laptop temperature because if I place the laptop directly on the air conditioner the problem becomes much less disturbing (although it does not disappear).

I first noticed this problem when upgrading to KDE 3.5 in Suse 9.3. Before then I had never had any kind of issue with my graphic card. What did it change from KDE 3.4 to KDE 3.5? Did 3.5 require a new version of Xorg that contained a buggy "radeon" driver for Mobility M7 cards? How many other people here experience some kind of problem with the "radeon" driver in Xorg? Thank you all.

Talk:Problem with garbled screen

2006-06-20T22:26:50Z

Ik4qix:

Got an A30 with this problem, don't know what GFX card it has. None of these things seems to help. But a clean reinstall will make it useable during the first boot, during that boot everything runs perfect, after a reboot the screen gets messed up and it can't boot windows in anything but Failsafe mode. Sadly i can't get it fixed under the warrenty as it is 3-4 years old.

Jan 18, 2006 - Me too
Just finished a day of working on an A30 with the garbled display problem. Ours boots to the IBM splash screen, but has blue vertical lines running across the screen. When booting to safe mode or to any text mode or utility, the display is responsive (i.e. can navigate using arrow keys, select choices, etc.) but is garbled much like the pictures in the main article of the LILO boot loader screen. The 'garbling' is consistent, and it appears that every other character in the character set gets substituted by the character one value higher than it in the set. For example, capital 'A' displays fine, but capital 'B' get substituted with capital 'C'. 'C' is also fine, but 'D' is substituted with 'E', and so on. The lowercase set corresponds to this pattern exactly as well. As such, the display can be deciphered, but is practically unusable in text mode. When Windows loads, however, everything looks normal. The only Windows-related problem is our inability to load the ATI Radeon driver - the system will not load the GUI with it installed, but will work normally with the generic Windows VGA driver.

Just to be thorough, I did flash the system BIOS and embedded controller software with latest versions, with no change in the display problem.

I attempted to reseat the video connector, but had no luck. Best price I found on a replacement system board was US$279.00, but I haven't decided whether or not to repair it yet.

 June 1, 2006 - Here's what happens to me. 
Since a few monthes, I also get the blue thick lines running accross the screen, but only if I enter the BIOS setup utility. In my experience there is no relation between the strange "features" shown by my laptop and the PC temperature, but it is much more likely that the screen becomes completely unusable if it is hot. 

"Normally" in X I have thin light blue lines that run across the windows and move with it until I resize the window or cover it with a just opened window. In that case the part of the "dirty" window that was covered by the "clean" window becomes "clean"...at least until you move it again. If I move the window very fast it becomes completely light blue. It's like if the driver (or the hardware) could not refresh properly the windows. Take a look at [http://www.maurocremonini.it/thinkpad_jun012006.jpg this screenshot]. 

Are we all sure that we are facing an actual hardware problem? Has anybody ever tried to run X by just using the generic VGA driver? I gather from the previous post that MS-Windows does not show problems in that case. I would try myself, but I do not know how to change the driver for X! 

 June 16, 2006 - This is my experience with this problem:
I have always had a feeling I have this problem since I tried once to install Fedora Linux on my portable. When initializing the graphical desktop, the phenomenon started.

When I install Windows 2000, except for the first installation stage, than I have a garbaged screen, everything works fine. I can have my full resolution, but, as described above, I can't install the display driver tools. Also, watching video's isn't smooth because it is disrupted by vertical blue or purple lines.

Installing Windows XP is not possible, I only get a resolution of 640x480 8 bit color, when I change the resolution to more colors or more pixels, I only get a blank screen (but you can see the backlight is lit)

I already dissasambled en reassambled my whole portable, checked connectors and so on... but never had any luck.

Also, when going into the BIOS, the inverted screen (gray with blue letters) is normal, but above and below there are blue lines.

Take also a look at this [http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=8315359#post8315359 discussion and screenshot]. 

I hope we can find more people with this problem and mybe a solution?

 June 21, 2006 - An update:
It is very funny (er...) that when I switch from 24 to 16 bit colour depth the vertical blue lines I was talking about above turn yellow!!! The problem is now not as big as it was some days ago and I think is related to 3D direct rendering I managed to enable a few days ago. There must be also an issue with laptop temperature because if place the laptop directly on the air conditioner the problem becomes much less disturbing (although it does not disappear).

I first noticed this problem when upgrading to KDE 3.5 in Suse 9.3. Before then I had never had any kind of issue with my graphic card. What did it change from KDE 3.4 to KDE 3.5? Did 3.5 require a new version of Xorg that contained a buggy "radeon" driver for Mobility M7 cards? How many other people here experience some kind of problem with the "radeon" driver in Xorg? Thank you all.

Talk:Error Codes and Beep Codes

2006-06-05T22:58:15Z

Ik4qix:

Hi! Just five minutes ago my A31 froze while two leds (the caps-lock + the scroll-lock) began blinking. Does anybody know what that means? Thanks! Mauro (p.s. Suse 10.1)

Talk:Error Codes and Beep Codes

2006-06-05T22:02:53Z

Ik4qix:

Hi! Just five minutes ago my A31 freezed while two leds (the caps-lock + the scroll-lock) began blinking. Does anybody know what that means? Thanks! Mauro (p.s. Suse 10.1)

Talk:Problem with garbled screen

2006-06-01T16:11:13Z

Ik4qix:

Talk:Problem with garbled screen

2006-06-01T15:58:41Z

Ik4qix:

Problem with garbled screen

2006-06-01T15:13:25Z

Ik4qix: /* Problem description */

Information about the problem of a randomly garbled screen.

==Problem description==
The symptom is a totally garbled screen (on the internal display) as seen in [http://bellet.info/photos/2003/Aug/10Aug18:10/ these pictures].

This happens directly after starting up: even the BIOS splash screen is unreadable. The screen can stay garbled for a number of boots and then (seemingly random) it will be just fine right from the start.

It has furthermore been reported that there might be a relation between the temperature of the ThinkPad and the garbled screen, so that the display starts working fine when the ThinkPad has reached a certain temperature (like after 5 minutes of being powered on). Also by applying pressure to a certain point underneath the ThinkPad (on A30s its below the information sticker on the underside). This seems to affect the garbled screen even more, which is highly noticable on a LILO boot screen [http://www.drakonus.dragoncity.net/thinkpad like so].

If the screen is exported via VNC the remote screen will also be garbled. However, this may not be always so. At least in an A31 screen got garbled right after returning from a text-only session (ctrl-alt-F1, cntr-alt-F7), but the VNC session previously opened on the same machine did not experience any change.

Most likely this is a problem with the ATI videochip, can people who experience this indicate which chip their machines contains? 
Looking at the effected machines, this is probably an issue specific to the [[ATI Mobility Radeon 7500]]

==Affected Models==
*ThinkPad {{T40}}, {{T41}}, {{T42}}, {{R40}}, {{A30}}, {{A31}}, {{A31p}}

==Affected Operating Systems==
*all

==Status==
It is probably a problem of the graphics circuitry. In any case, it's a hardware problem and warranty will apply.

==Solutions==
You can have IBM fix the problem if your ThinkPad is still in warranty.

One reported workaround is suspending to ram after powering on and leaving it on power. This way the screen might still be fine after wakeup.
The moment when you cold boot again, keep the laptop at the garbled boot screen for about 5 minutes, then do a normal reboot and press your thumbs.

The problem can also be due to bad contact on screen and/or keyboard connectors on motherboard.
Try pulling out the keyboard and pushing slightly the connectors, the screen should display again correctly. If yes try puting a foam hold over the connectors and pull back the keyboard.

Depending on the ThinkPad model, running the laptop on only battery power should reduce the garbled/corrupt effect. Due to the lowered processor speed, it should generate less heat which should reduce the corruption. It helps to have a high-charge capacity battery to prevent it from happening.

In some models (At least the T40 with 9000 pro) the problem dissapear if you make an underclock. The default clock of the mobility 9000 pro is 250mhz in the core and 200mhz in the memory. if you lower the core clock to 100mhz the problem dissapear. In linux you can use a tool called rovclock to make the underclock.

Instructions for gentoo and the mobility 9000:

1) Download rovclock from this website:
http://www.hasw.net/linux/
2) Compile it
3) Copy the binary to /usr/local/bin
4) Put these lines in your /etc/conf.d/local.start

cd /usr/local/bin
rovclock -c 100 -m 200

Sorry for my bad english, im only speak spanish

---

I recently experienced this problem; in my case it sometimes also failed to boot at all and produced one-long-two-short-beeps.

My diagnosis was that one or more of the pins on the ATI Radeon chip had come unsoldered, such that it would make contact if the laptop was pressed or twisted a certain way, but not others. I dismantled the laptop until I could reach the chip (it's under the fan assembly, so you can leave things like the PCMCIA assembly and right ultrabay on). Pressing on different corners of the chip made it work or fail. It's a surface-mount chip with the pins underneath (BGA?), so you can't resolder it from the top OR bottom. I had to make a custom tip for my heat gun by bending some aluminum to a square slightly larger than the chip (1.25" square). 15 seconds at the 1000F setting successfully resoldered the chip for me. We'll see about long-term reliability. I hope you find this useful. Obviously I would not do this on a computer which was still under warranty, but for a computer which is not, replacing the entire system board (IBM's procedure for fixing this problem) is simply not economical.