Mac OS 9 Discussion > Video Cards, Monitors & Displays

Display settings issue on macos9.2?

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motorolababy:
Hi! This may possibly be a question with a really simple answer, but it’s my first time using macos 9. Extremely grateful to this forum which I’ve found a lot of answers on already!

I rescued a Power Mac G4 from the bin at my office. It booted fine but my monitor started complaining about the display settings so I played around with them a little, and accidentally picked one that made the monitor go black and seemingly lose connection to the mac (‘no input’ message on the monitor). I tried resetting the PRAM and I can see the boot screen ok, but after it boots the screen just goes black again.

Aside from resetting the PRAM, can anyone suggest a way I can clear the display settings on boot? Another possible solution I thought of was maybe to use DVi instead of VGA but I don’t want to go out and find a dvi cable if it’s not going to work :-[

I’d be so grateful for any suggestions! Thank you so much in advance  :)

Jubadub:
Try booting from a CD. You can burn the "Universal" Mac OS 9.2.2 CD we have on the site.

This will allow you to boot using the CD's monitor preferences, which should work. Then simply navigate to the "Preferences" folder inside your "System Folder", and trash that. This will effectively reset all settings.

This also means anything like a given app's registration etc., and the configuration for other apps, will also be reset. If you have anything important like that, then we need to identify the exact Preferences file that has your monitor display info. There should be a "Monitors Preferences" folder inside the main "Preferences" folder, so maybe you could trash just that, but I don't know if that's the right one or if it will suffice.

I'm sure someone else can help by pinpointing the exact file. But that's how I'd solve this. Another way is to just temporarily move out all the contents of the "Preferences" folder, boot into the system (which will create preference files from scratch), then you dump back the original contents inside, and when prompted to replace files, select "No" or equivalent. This will remove the problematic files, and keep just about everything else that could matter in your existing installation.

One way or another, I do recommend getting a CD to boot from.

Slimes:
Get a Benefi vga to hdmi adapter and set the resolution with a modern monitor and never touch the monitors control panel again. This was the only solution that worked for me.

ovalking:
Try removing the video card and putting it back in.
Worked for me once with same symptoms (albeit cause unknown).

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