[ale] Best way to get dual display working (take 2k)

[Greg Clifton]

Yeah, a live CD boot takes lots longer than a "boot & install" cause you're
actually installing pretty much the whole OS to a RAM disk rather than just
an installer program, right? FWIW, I remember reading maybe a year or two
ago that ASUS was making Gigabyte's boards (at least some of them). Seems
all mobo manufacturers have bad batches from time to time, but Asus and
Gigabyte are in the top 5 to 8 manufacturers in my book. On the video card
issue, all modern graphics cards are actually [at least] two cards in one,
the basic VGA for boot purposes and the high end GPU chip/circuit with lots
of memory that doesn't come into play until the drivers are loaded. So while
not common, still possible to have the VGA part good but some of the memory
or other circuitry of the GPU hosed. I always prefer to grab a new video
card out of the anti-static bag by the mounting bracket which is attached to
the ground plane of the board and then touch the power supply in the
computer with my other hand (while still holding the graphics card) to
equalize the charge. Of course, it should go without saying that you should
unplug the power cord to your power supply before you install the new card,
but I have been known to forget about the 5V standby power.
GC

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 11:03 PM, Scott Castaline <skotchman at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 01/05/2011 10:24 PM, Scott Castaline wrote:
> > On 01/05/2011 05:49 PM, Greg Clifton wrote:
> >> Not highly likely, but the VGA portion of the card, which runs the
> >> POST program and until the drivers load to kick it into "high gear"
> >> so to speak, is good but the high performance part is bad. That is
> >> why I thought booting from a live CD might be good to confirm that
> >> the hardware is OK and that the system boots with the new card on a
> >> "clean" OS. That would narrow it down to a software config issue on
> >> your system. I'm a noob with Linux so I can't help resolve the
> >> software issues, but you do want to rule out the possibility of it
> >> being hardware related.
> >>
> > I also have a problem doing that right now as since F 13, I can't boot
> > a LiveCD or InstallCD. It was something to do with Award BIOS on
> > Gigabyte boards. I was able to boot those DVDs by taking my DVD-ROM
> > and jury-rigging one of my HDD USB enclosures to the ODD. That was one
> > of the reasons why when my last board burned out I wanted to make a
> > change and initially went with ASUS. I went through 3 ASUS MoBos and
> > finally went back to Gigabyte. I just recently found out that there
> > were some defective ASUS boards in their inventory, possibly a bad
> > batch of boards.
> Take that back. It was only with DVD boot with F 13. Just after sending
> this I remembered that I had just installed F 14 about a week before the
> old one blew up. So I tried it again with the onboard chip and was able
> to boot. Retried the using the 5770 and I forgot how long it takes to
> boot from CD, don't do it very often but it came up with the same boot
> failure. So you may have something on that. RMA time I guess.
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