Remove phantom external monitor from iBook

May 02, '03 10:06:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I had been reading in a few forums and in the apple discussion groups about a problem with the iBook where it was thinking that an external display was connected when there was none present. I recently (last night, while trying to study for finals) had this happen to me and it was a major PITA. The problem continued today and having no Applecare Support I decided to poke around and see if I could figure out the problem. What follows is a description of the problem and what i did to fix it.

PROBLEM: The display randomly fades in and out and resizes the 1024X768 display into a 640X480 window surrounded by black. Checking the Display section in System Preferences shows the display settings for "Color VGA" and "Color LCD." Setting the "COLOR VGA" display to 1024X768 @ 85Mhz resolves the 640X480 window problem, but the fading in and out persists.

SOLUTION:

  1. Turn off the computer
  2. Hold down Option+Command+P+R and turn on the computer. This is the parameter RAM reset key combination.
  3. You will hear the Mac "ding." Continue to hold down this key combination until you hear four "ding" sounds. This zaps the PRAM
  4. Immediately after the fourth "ding," hold down Option+Command+O+F to boot into open firmware.
  5. Type the reset-nvram and hit return, then type reset-all and hit return.
  6. Now, hold down Option-S to boot into the command line in single-user mode
  7. Type fsck -y and hit return. This will run a file system check. My check resulted in two errors in the multi-linked files.
  8. If you get any sort of error, keep running fsck -y until the check returns no errors on the volume. If you see everything is OK, proceed to the next step.
  9. Type exit and hit return.
The Computer will now boot into OS X. Check the Display section in System Preferences again and if all goes well, you should only have 1 pannel for "Color LCD."

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