Occasional black screens at startup
 

Hi, I started using Fedora Core 3 recently and sometimes immediately after the initial loading screen (and before the prompt for username), my monitor screen will turn black. Nothing will happen despite mouse movement, keystrokes, etc. After I reset my comp, I usually don't have the same problem again until I turn off my computer. Does anyone know what could be causing this? Fedora detects my video card (ATI Radeon 9800), and I set my monitor as Generic LCD Display 1280x1024, which seems to be working alright. On another note, when I startup windows xp, my comp will also freeze the first time around unless I start in safe mode, so I'm thinking that the problem may be something with hardware if I have startup issues with both windows and fedora. I have a stadnard ps/2 keyboard and usb mouse, AMD Athlon 2.4, 512 mb ddr ram , nvidia nForce2 chipset. Umm, I think that's all the relevant info. I had these problems even before updating the kernel, so that isn't the problem. Any help would be appreciated...thanks!

I'd suspect the following things...
a) underpowered PS for the box
b) buggy BIOS version - check for updates
c) non-suitable RAM or RAM timings



Happy hunting,
Tink

Thanks for your reply, but now these occasional black screens have become permanent. I recently installed glib and Java VM plus some other packages with yum, and after I restarted my computer, I could no longer get to the login screen. I don't know if what I installed had any affect, but I don't have any backup kernels to boot to. Should I boot off the CD and reinstall fedora or should I just forget about it and upgrade my computer? I don't know if my PS is the problem. I don't think it's too old, and it's 420 watts. My Shuttle mobo and amd cpu check out as being compatible. I'm really not sure if this is a Linux problem anymore since my windows will occasionally freeze at startup, even with minimal processes starting up in the background.

Ok, so after that last post, my computer booted up properly the next day for some mysterious reason. However, when I do occasionally get the black screens, something else flashes too. A red box in the middle of my screen flashes saying:
NON-SUPPORTED MODE
H: (some number) kHz
V: (some number) kHz

So is this a monitor problem then? I have a Xcreen LCD. Yea, it was cheap...

Play around with the monitor's frequency. I had similiar
problem. Does the monitor works for a Window machine?
Mine did (but not Xandros). It turns out the frequency
needed to be change.

Sheng-Chieh

thank you! It does work on a Windows machine, and it works now on Linux after I did a screen reset. Again, thanks a lot.

i am having a similar problem can you please tell me how to do a screen reset as this is all foreign to me on that kind of aspect