Post LILO - Pre Log-in Video Problem

[lizardking]

A small anoying problem has cropped up. When I turn on the computer, the BIOS cycles good, graphical LILO comes up and gives me the choices. I choose Linux and the load continues into the non-interactive portions.

As soon as the graphical portion to choose which user to log-in should come on-screen, the video goes dark. I mean, the words were scrolling by, then the screen *clicks* and goes dark (The power button changes from Green to yellow and the hard drive stops churning.)

If I try enough resets, I can get the log-in screen. Sometimes it trys my patience and I go through 8-10 cycles before I can log-in. Sometimes I failsafe, init 3 then log-in and KDE. (It works about 50% of the time) I'm thinking this may have to do with the time between switching from text to graphical modes within xorg but I'm not certain.

Any ideas on whats happening and how to repair this?

Mandriva 2006 Free
P3 in an old Dell OptiPlex GX-100
ATI Radeon 7000 video card
ViewSonic G773 monitor
Some old Intel NIC 10/100 TX
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value

[md5sum]

This a guess but I think X is putting the monitor into a mode it no longer handles very well. look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf .
There should be a section that looks like this.

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 28-50
VertRefresh 43-72
EndSection

The HorizSync and VertRefresh should match your monitors specs. If you don't have them anymore you can google for your monitors model number and the word spec to find them. Once you find them edit the file and restart X.
Alternatively you could use your distros Xwindows setup program to try and discover the proper settings.

[lizardking]

md5sum:

Thanx! You gave me clue I needed. I have recomputed my ModeLine values, It seems that KDE/Mandrake/X didn't give the correct values for the Viewsonic G773. I corrected to

# Viewsonic G773 by Lizardking
ModeLine "1024x768" 85 1024 1032 1152 1360 768 784 787 823

and it works (after tweaking the hardware switches in front)

Once again, Thanx for the quick response!