Hello, I'm having an issue with my console screen. When I switch from X into it everything is garbled and I can't do anything whatsoever, I can't even switch back into X. I'm forced to do a hard reset.

Specs:

AMD 2500+ XP
ASUS Mobo, nForce2 Chipset
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Gentoo Linux 2.6.6

I hear this is a common problem with the ATI cards, and the problem did not occur before I installed the ATI drivers.

Currently in my kernel I have support for framebuffered devices, and ATI Radeon display support enabled. I've tinkered with the settings, I've tried just using the vesa driver, without any luck.

Any help would be appreciated.

I have no idea why this is happening, but you might be able to recover without resetting by typing:

reset

when your console is garbaged. You won't be able to see it of course but if you just type reset and hit enter it should reset the console if the keytable isn't trashed. Might save a hard reboot anyway.

Im having the same problem in my Toshiba Satellite 2450!
Whenever I press ctrl-alt-f1 to go to the console, the screen becomes unusable and I must press alt-f7 to return to KDE!

Does anybody have an idea on how to solve this?

i had the same problem with my laptop, the new computer we have tho (uses ATI Radeon) has no problem,,,.... i heard a while back from someone that it was probably something wrong with the refresh rates

so check the rates to make sure they are right

Well, this is how I solve this:

I went to xfconfig86 and tried to make all the best choices. I think the most critical answer in when to enter the horizontal refresh rate. In case of doubt, I choose a conservative option.

Then I went to boot>boot loader, choose grub and for the linux entry in the os choose menu I went to modify>advanced and I choose "1024x768 in 16 bits (framebuffer only)".

after a reboot the problem was solved.

I noticed however, that sometimes in the console, the command line was to much to the left, that is, i could only see the last letters of the prompt. but I simply return to X and back to the console, and it was perfectly aligned!