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:
- Turn off the computer
- Hold down Option+Command+P+R and turn on the computer. This is the parameter RAM reset key combination.
- You will hear the Mac "ding." Continue to hold down this key combination until you hear four "ding" sounds. This zaps the PRAM
- Immediately after the fourth "ding," hold down Option+Command+O+F to boot into open firmware.
- Type the reset-nvram and hit return, then type reset-all and hit return.
- Now, hold down Option-S to boot into the command line in single-user mode
- Type fsck -y and hit return. This will run a file system check. My check resulted in two errors in the multi-linked files.
- 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.
- 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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