Xubuntu 9.04, resolution reverts to 1600x1200 every time

[habilis]

I recently installed Xubuntu 9.04 on a desktop computer. Everytime I boot up, the screen resolution has reverted back to 1600x1200. I change it to 1024x768 but the next time its always back to 1600x1200.

I have a 16MB NVIDIA RIVA TNT 2 Model 64 AGP video card. I didn't install any proprietary drivers for it. Monitor is a Dell UltraScan P780 16" CRT. Any Ideas?

Also: When I go to " menu > settings > Display" and change the resolution, what file does this alter?

[oz]

You should be able to remove the 1600x1200 resolution setting from your xorg.conf file if you have an xorg.conf file. If you don't have one, try creating one and put the resolutions that you want to run in it.

Maybe some of the others will come up with better possible options.

[Cida]

In your xorg.conf there will probably be "1600x1200" "1024x768"
If you switch them round so "1024x768" is first, it should start up in 1024x768, I don't know how much refresh rate your screen can handle but mine is 75 max I think, an when I switched it round it was out of scan range, an I had to reinstall it (Im new to Linux, an I would assume there are other ways around reinstalling but, couldn't be bothered to find out) but I just changed "1024x768" to "1024x768_75" an that worked ok

[habilis]

Thanks Ozar, and Thanks Cida,

I was going to try to utilize your suggestions. When I booted up the computer I got Grub Error 18. The last time I shut the computer down there was a read/write error on sector 124378.. [not exact number]

Prior to the shut down the hard drive was making a few funny noises. Could a single bad sector up in the 12,000 range cause the Grub error 18? Is there a way to recover from this? (as opposed to scrapping the drive and installing on another one)

[oz]

Prior to the shut down the hard drive was making a few funny noises. Could a single bad sector up in the 12,000 range cause the Grub error 18? Is there a way to recover from this? (as opposed to scrapping the drive and installing on another one)

If the drive was making strange noises, it's probably time for a new drive. If you have any valuable data on the drive, you might want to try recovering it and saving it off to a safe storage place before you do much experimenting with the drive.

[habilis]

Does anyone know a good program that checks the integrity of hard drives? I'll probably scrap this drive, but I've been looking for a way to test hard drives. Not so much an over-the-months SMART monitoring type program, but one that checks them on the spot.

[oz]

TestDisk and PhotoRec are the best data recovery apps that I know of, if that's what you mean:

TestDisk - CGSecurity

They both can be found on the Parted Magic LiveCD:

Parted Magic News

[habilis]

Thanks for the recommendation ozar. It was a fresh install so there was nothing to recover. I checked out Testdisk and PhotoRec and they're mainly recovery programs (as you know) so I didn't need to use them this time, but, while I was looking through the CGsecurity website I saw info about "smartmonools" and then learned that there's a graphical interface for "smartctl" called "GSmartcontrol". I thought that SMART programs had to be run over the long term to get any data but smartctl has tests that you can run, which is what I was looking for.

It turns out that all these utilites are included in PartedMagic. So with the help of a few ubuntu.com Howto guides, I burned my first ever boot disk using a linux computer. Yay! : ) I then ran PartedMAgic as a live CD on the Xubuntu machine and did some tests with GSmartcontrol. It "passed" the basic test, but it apparently required a firmware upgrade to have the capabiltiy to do the longer test. I'm no expert at interpreting SMART data, but I saw a lot of "old age" entries.

I don't really know if its the hard drive or something else that is the problem. I looked into the Grub error 18 and it has something to do with BIOS hard drive capacity limitations. The drive I have in there is a 20GB IDE drive. The computer is a Dell Dimension 4100 from around 2000/2001?, so I don't think the drive is too big. It has BIOS version A11. In any case it was working fine throughout 8 or 9 boots over several days. Then I saw the 'read/write error at sector 12,xxx' error while shutting it down. Then the Grub error 18 on the next boot up. From the threads I've read, Grub error 18 usually happens on the first reboot after an installation.

I saw in an old thread somewhere that Debian discs have an option to reinstall Grub. I thought maybe my Xubuntu install disc might have this option so I booted the Xubuntu computer with the disc and there was no such option. But I saw an option "Boot from first hard drive" so I did that one and the computer booted to the login screen and I logged in to the desktop. But right after I executed the 'boot from first hard drive' option in the Xubuntu disc menu, it flashed an error screen that said something like "ACPI Timing off". It happened quickly, so I'm not sure if thats what it said. I'm running the drive in DMA mode 5. I have an 80 pin IDE cable. But maybe mode 5 is too fast. Would this cause the problems I'm having?

My question is, can anyone take a shot at what might be going on, or what I should do now?

I could just install on another hard drive, but this has become a learning experience so I'd like to learn all I can from it.