White screen after MD boots [SOLVED]

[caddywhompus]

I've seen all the posts about the black screen after installing.  This issue is a little different.

I have my core up and running, and I've plugged my first diskless MD into the switch and booted it PXE.  It's an older Toshiba laptop, P4-2.0 with Geforce 4 onboard graphics.  The machine boots, but when the AV wizard is supposed to come up, the entire LCD screen turns white, like every pixel slowly fades from black to white over about 5 seconds.

I've tried the number keys, and the machine responds with a little beep, then tosses me back out to the console for a couple seconds, then the screen goes black and begins fading to white again.

I believe this is a problem with the Nvidia driver, though I'm unclear how to diagnose or troubleshoot it without being able to see the screen.

For the record, there is nothing wrong with the laptop.  It has Fedora 12 on the hard drive and runs beautifully with the restricted driver enabled (96.x Legacy).  This is only a problem when booting the diskless image.

By the way, this is a 8.10b2 installation.

Please help?

[caddywhompus]

OK, Further info...

I've now tried PXE booting two different laptops as MDs.  The newer one (my wife's) is also a Toshiba, but it's newer and has GeForce 5200 graphics onboard.

On the newer laptop, I'm getting the same problem (I think) except it manifests itself slightly different.  When the machine is done booting, and the AV Wizard is supposed to come up, the screen just goes off.  It's like it went into power saving mode and the display was turned off.

I've tried the number buttons, and I can hear the beep telling me they are responding, but the display never comes back up.

Now I think the older laptop (1st post) is actually doing the same thing, except the backlight is staying on for some reason.  I believe the display is just getting powered down for some odd reason.

Now that this problem is repeatable, maybe a closer look is in order?

[caddywhompus]

OK, I'm posting this even though it makes me feel stupid.  Hopefully it will help someone.

I got BOTH laptops up and running over the weekend.  The issue was painfully simple, yet completely overlooked by myself for hours while I messed around.

The AV Wizard was defaulting to the EXTERNAL VGA connector, (which had no monitor connected) rather than the internal display.  This makes no sense to me, but it IS what was happening.

Connecting a monitor to the VGA plug showed the AV wizard on both laptops, and selecting "VGA-2" as my default connector pushed it back to the internal display.

Another note is that the default refresh rate appears to be 50Hz, which is incompatible with both the internal displays on both laptops (possibly the reason why the external VGA was activated?)  Even my external monitor (a cheap 15" analog LCD) displayed the AV-Wizard but had a warning on the screen "Input signal out of range, please correct".  Once I changed the refresh (I went to 75Hz) everything was happy, and the internal display was selectable on VGA-2.

So hopefully this silly issue helps someone, maybe just because it's now documented in the forums.

-Jim