Screen Problems...

[EllipsisVX]

Hey guys,

Well i just got my pet-project, old Dell L400 up and running (to some degree - the last piece I need HD Caddy the seller on eBay shipped me the wrong item ) Anyways... I booted from a Gentoo LiveCD and it worked great the first couple times and then all the sudden, bam, i lost all the red in my screen. I can only control the blue and green gamma levels. I swapped out motherboards (had a spare), checked the display (opened the screen up and made sure all the wires were connected properly) but still it's all blue and green and no red (which means no white either).

Anyone have any thoughts of where the problem is and where to look? I'm thinking its obvious in the screen/display itself because swapping the motherboards made no difference. Short maybe? Or maybe I'm missing a flex wire or something.

Anyone with any ideas i'd greatly appreciate it, I want it looking like it was before (and not have to buy a new screen)

Thanks!

[R3c0nna1ssanc3]

Hmmm I would check all of the connections real quick. Just clean out the ports and reseat the screen connections.

[TimK]

Hmmm I would check all of the connections real quick. Just clean out the ports and reseat the screen connections.

That would be a good start, it could be the monitor itself that is causing this problem or possible something with your graphics card. Is the graphics card older or updated?

Try plugging an external monitor into it to see what happens, that should narrow it down to a few things.

[R3c0nna1ssanc3]

If you find out its not a hardware problem you should also make sure all of your drivers are up to date.

[EllipsisVX]

Unfortunately I don't have an external monitor here at school to use. I think it's a screen issue, I checked the cables again and they were all seated fine and clean. It's just weird because it was working fine, then all the sudden the next time I booted it up it wasn't, so I swapped out the motherboards and it still wasn't. You can see bluish tints to everything even during BIOS bootup (Dell Logo and Text are blue-er than they should be aka Light Blue Text instead of White Text).

I hope it's not the screen as I just have gotten all the parts in for the computer to get it in working shape and would hate to dish out more money for a new screen, although I suppose I could try to find one on eBay that's broken (minus the screen) and swap out the screens. Maybe a short or something in the Flex Ribbons?

And the System doesn't have an OS yet, still waiting on the HDD Caddy, but from running a bootdisk had the same issues which leads me to think the issue is physical and not software.