I don’t know what I did. Last night I connected my system to the big screen with the S-Video cable for a game. The video card I’m using is a secondary I added in. I was using the card before moving it and am using it now in Linux. I remember changing something in the appearance settings when connected to the TV, but now I can’t get to it to change it back. For some reason when I connect to the TV now, there is no signal.
When I connect the monitor to the Nvidia card, it takes me to the OS selection prompt. Selecting Linux works fine, but if I select Windows the power light goes amber. If I connect it to the stock card, the light stays green, but nothing shows on the monitor. In addition, for some reason, Windows doesn’t allow me to F1 into the settings to do a recovery or safe start-up.
(I hope this is all making sense.)
So, in short, I need to get to the settings to get the monitor to work, ot run a system restore to yesterday afternoon. (No, I don’t have a recover disk.) :smack:
Hit F8 following the power-on memtest. Select Safe Mode from the startup menu. Once the GUI loads (in Safe mode, it will use the default VGA driver with minimal resolution and 256-color mode), you should be able to go and undo whatever you did. If not, you can use Safe Mode to uninstall the graphic adapter from the Device Manager, and reboot to allow Windows to redetect it. It will then reinstall the driver with default settings.
In the future here’s a helper post. The Windows OS was directed to TV output still when it tried to start, so the screen after selecting Windows was being sent to only the TV. The monitor light was amber, because no signal was being sent to it after the card was told to send the output to the TV.
No picture may have been present on the TV, for a couple reasons, but one is software related. The Nvidia controls can be set for auto select for the TV format between composite and s-video. The card may have started to send the signal by the composite mode instead of the s-video. Select s-video as the output format instead of auto select.
This is a hardware reason and a software work around. The Nvidia control panel can be set force TV display, and the TV display is available all the time, including when you don’t have it cabled to the computer and turned on before start up of the computer. Start up of the computer is when the available displays are detected.
To avoid the problem in the future force the TV display detection on and set the display format output to s-video not auto.
The display can be set on the newer cards for two at a time, and then you could choose the clone option and the game will display on both at the same time with duplicate screens. I use dual mode at all times and direct movies to the TV. You can set programs to run in what ever display you want. I run them on the monitor, but you could run them on the TV. Just don’t run them as spanned across monitors or part will be on each one.