Running 3.2.29 on Lenovo R61 15.4" laptop. This laptop is set up for dual boot, Windows XP and Linux. When I start up Linux the screen sometimes goes blank when the resolution changes halfway through the boot. Most of the time when I do a blind login and reboot it will come up normally. Once in a while it will take two or three reboots to get a visible screen. Occurs upon power up and on rebooting from Windows.

Anybody out there solve this problem? It's more of an annoyance than anything else. I've had this laptop for about six months. (From eBay)

syscon7

What distro are you running? You said "running 3.2.29," posted in a general laptop section, and your distro to the left says slackware. I just want to make sure we are on the same page here

I would start at looking in your distro's /var/log/messages and dmesg (of course the equivelant to /var/log/messages if different) and see if you see any warnings, errors, notifications, etc, about anything related to video drivers, lcd, X, etc - In the /var/log/ directory, you should have Xorg logs as well; definitely look at these as well!

Running Slackware distro 14, 3.2.29 is the kernel version reported. I just had the problem booting up and did a blind dump of dmesg, messages and syslog. Also did a dump the second time when the screen was visible. a quick glance at the files didn't show anything obvious. I don't run X11 when I start up but I'll look at those files anyway. I don't think this is a Slackware related issue as I'm running that same distro on a couple of other systems with no problems.

I'll do a more detailed, line by line comparison of the files and see if anything pops.

syscon7

Ahh, sorry about that, I was assuming you were using X. I was thinking in a different direction... Sounds like something to do with video initialization, etc; Are you using grub or lilo for the bootloader?

A comparison of the dmesg, messages and syslog didn't show any real differences that might explain what's going on. I'm using lilo for the bootloader. Saw another thread with a similar problem where someone recommended using "nomodeset" in the startup script. Lilo chokes on "nomodeset". I'll keep poking around. That was in the Slackware forum.

syscon7

Try to run your GNU/Linux boot with 1 behind. Simply add "1" to the bootline to run in "single user mode". It will take away most unecessary things and give you command line where you can check your logs.