After a while, screen turns black and flashes white stripes

[0percent]

I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 on an old Compaq desktop, and after working on it for a while, screen randomly turns blank, usually with flashing horizontal white lines. Can anyone help? Someone already told me to try memtest, which I already performed, but nothing happened.(And I'm not very computer-savvy, so if you guys could please explain it to me in simpler terms, thanks).

[rykel]

I have a problem with the screen going black with white stripes at the top of the screen when booting up. It appears BEFORE the User Login Screen.

[cutekazuya]

Hello,

I had similar problem when the screen would go blank but i would get vertical grey lines.

I have the following graphics card:

"Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)"

To find out your graphics card type the following in termial:

lspci | grep VGA

apparently the driver which was in use "i915" was not working well with the xorg so i switched to "vesa" driver and since i have not ever had a problem.

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

The above command will show your current xorg.conf file, you want to change the Driver "whatever" to Driver "vesa"

or if its blank then copy/paste the following, save and reboot:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 110.0
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 150.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes      "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

[rykel]

btw I got the problem after I installed some MacOSX theme and then removed it. I cannot recall exactly where I got the theme, but it was from someone's blog.

[rykel]

Hi, I solved my own problem! (by coincidence)

I purged nvidia-* and edubuntu-* from my system. One of them apparently "cleaned" up my bootup screen.

[0percent]

To cutekazuya: Well, I found out that my graphics card is: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03; however, I was not able to use the 2 last codes. When typing in the second code, it asked for my sudo password or something, which I, for some reason, could not type in (they're asking for my account password, right?), and for the last code, it just said "command not found" after each line.

[waggers]

I have the same graphics card, and more or less the same problem - random crashes with the screen going black, and some vertical white stripes flashing in the top half of the screen. It hasn't happened when booting up, before the login screen (yet) so the problem isn't identical to Rykel's.

I tried adding

Driver         "vesa"

to the "Device" section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf as cutekazuya suggested, but on reboot that puts my system on a horribly low resolution with no ability to change it in System>Preferences>Monitors.

So then I tried replacing my existing device, monitor and screen sections with the code cutekazuya posted, but that caused my system to freeze completely on startup and I had to go into recovery mode and revert the changes. So I'm back to square one.

Any further suggestions?

[0percent]

Thanks cutekazuya, the problem hasn't shown up at all so far!

[ckuru]

I have a similar problem. I installed Ubuntu netbook version on my HP netbook Mini 110 with Windows 7. After installing Ubuntu the first boot up failed. It hangs with a black screen with a flashing text-mode cursor. After several attempts (just rebooting) it worked. However, about 95% of the time the machine fails to boot - after 3-4 seconds, and without showing anything on the screen (text or graphical), it hangs with a black screen with a flashing text-mode cursor. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7 (or any other keys) has no effect.

Can someone help me put on this ?

Thanks.
CK

[tbird6820]

I'm having same problem,system crashes and flashing vertical white bars about half way.

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)

my current resolution: 1600 x 900 (16.9)
refresh rate: 60 Hz
Rotation: Normal