Bear with my partial speculations here.
When the computer boots, it sets the initial timing modes for the lowest
common defaults for SVGA monitors...
When you entered NT, OS did several things...
1) It re-adjusted the timing modes for the video adapter
2) It re-allocated video ram to correspond to the new desktop size and color
depth
3) It inited the registers, etc, and flipped the adapter into graphics mode.
When you WARM booted into Linux, most of the NT settings remained in effect.
X starts up and also inits DPMS mode in the monitor. BRRRRAAP. First
potential problem and possible cause of what you saw.
X allocates video RAM... BRRRAAP... X might be fooled by what the video
adapter is now reporting as available RAM... (I've seen this one many
times...)
X reads the current clock registers and adjusts the ones it thinks need
adjustment... Not all of them may be hit... BRRAAAP (sound of buzzer)
another point of problems...
Had you COLD booted, or pressed the reset button instead of warm booting you
would have not had a problem. Cold booting or a hard reset causes the system
to initialize the cards completely...
-JMS
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Romanator
Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2000 8:06 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [newbie] The Deadly Black Screen at KDE
Does any one know why the screen goes completely black with sporadic
flashes just before KDE was to start up? Here's' what happened:
1. I was emailing friend in this morning while in Windows NT4 using
Netscape
2. After sending the email, I logged out of Netscape
3. While in Windows NT4 SP5, I selected Start->Shutdown and Restart
Computer
4. My computer rebooted to lilo and after 5 seconds went to begin
loading Linux Mandrake
5. When it came to the time where KDE was to start up, the screen went
black with sporadic flashes of color. I could only use CNTRL-ALT-DEL(I'm
familiar with the 3 keys) to stop this, so I reinstalled.
Was that wrong?
Any ideas?
Roman
(Learning is a never ending process)
