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Hi All,
So I think I have "worse than blue screen" death on my computer but wanted feedback. Computer is a notebook Dell Inspiron 9400, Nvidia 7900 Go, 2 gigs ...
- 02-23-2009 #1Linux Guru
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Is My Computer Dead :(
Hi All,
So I think I have "worse than blue screen" death on my computer but wanted feedback. Computer is a notebook Dell Inspiron 9400, Nvidia 7900 Go, 2 gigs of RAM
If someone can take a guess at what the problem is (I have suspicion that it's the video card), I'll just buy the part even if it's a couple hundred....
Symptoms:
A few days ago I booted and I saw green squares at boot (during Bios and at Grub menu) then it kept freezing up at the login screen (Ubuntu) or it just wouldn't load at all and go to black screen
Reinstalled Ubuntu, worked for a few days, now same symptoms.
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- 02-24-2009 #2Linux Newbie
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have u tried installing other OS? and check if same symptoms show?
Originally Posted by jmadero 
Hi All,
So I think I have "worse than blue screen" death on my computer but wanted feedback. Computer is a notebook Dell Inspiron 9400, Nvidia 7900 Go, 2 gigs of RAM
If someone can take a guess at what the problem is (I have suspicion that it's the video card), I'll just buy the part even if it's a couple hundred....
Symptoms:
A few days ago I booted and I saw green squares at boot (during Bios and at Grub menu) then it kept freezing up at the login screen (Ubuntu) or it just wouldn't load at all and go to black screen
Reinstalled Ubuntu, worked for a few days, now same symptoms.
Images below:
P4 1.8, 1G DDR ram, 64mb GF2 MX400, 80G WD and 40G Maxtor, ECS mobo. Playing XP,Slack 12.0 and Vector Linux 5.8 GOLD, STD 6.0 Zenwalk 4.6.1, OpenBSD 3.9
- 02-24-2009 #3Super Moderator
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Stick any LiveCD in the machine and reboot. I'm betting it's not the machine but rather something is wrong with the OS that's already installed, maybe GRUB.
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- 02-24-2009 #4Linux Guru
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I just popped my Widows CD in and the green squares showed up on the install (I didn't actually install it). I don't know how a OS install would screw up the Bios screen, that's my biggest concern
Bodhi 1.3 & Bodhi 1.4 using E17
Dell Studio 17, Intel Graphics card, 4 gigs of RAM, E17
"The beauty in life can only be found by moving past the materialism which defines human nature and into the higher realm of thought and knowledge"
- 02-24-2009 #5Linux Guru
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I was gonna suggest flashing the bios in case it got corrupted. But you probably don't have a floppy drive and I don't know if dell has a bootable bios flash update for your computer. I fixed one of my laptops that way with a bootable floppy bios update after the screen gave me lines , not sqaures though.
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- 02-24-2009 #6Linux Guru
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What you could try though is pulling the cmos battery so bios will reset to defaults and see if that improves the situation any. You can always go back into bios any reconfigure it to like you had it.
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- 02-24-2009 #7Linux Engineer
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I think its green chicken pox.
- 02-24-2009 #8Trusted Penguin
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The last time I saw something like that, the cable attaching the graphics output to the monitor had worked loose.
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- 02-24-2009 #9Trusted Penguin
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You might be on to something there, and I would also check to see if the video card is still seated properly. Originally Posted by elija Jay
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- 02-24-2009 #10Linux Enthusiast
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I see that you hava a laptop. I know most Dell PCs are built quite accessible, but I don't know how they do that with notebooks. I guess it will be really tough to get to the motherboard. I suppose you try to, but be really careful not to damage anything. I hope you can fix it.
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