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Reset ANY 'out of range' display
Authored by: romulis on Jun 29, '04 07:47:28AM

WARNING: The Displays menu bar doesn't check that the resolutions/refresh rates actually match the screen you have plugged in (but the preference pane does). If you plug in a new screen, the displays menu may have entries from your previous screen, which don't work with the new one. If you select a resolution which the screen can't handle, OSX blindly obliges, your screen goes black, and there's no easy way to select another resolution (unless you can use your mouse without seeing the screen :-)

I accidentally did this a few months ago (G5, Panther, TFT screen that doesn't handle anything above 60Hz). By plugging in the old display I could see what I was doing, but as soon as I plugged in the new one, OSX switched to the previous setting for the new display - which was, in this case, no good. (This is however a brilliant feature if you have a PB which you use in several locations! It even remembers if the display was to the left or right of the laptop, and which background you had on each of the different external screens!)

After much rebooting, zapping nvram and pushing reset buttons on the mainboard etc, without success, I realised that the safe-boot from MacOS 7,8,9 still works in OSX.

Simply hold down the shift key while booting, and your mac will re-sync itself with its environment (ie: check the screen) and you're back in business.

Now that OSX is so stable I had completely forgotten about shift-booting. I guess that's also a sign of quality ;-)



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