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Re: Debian live (lenny) boot options for vaio PCG-6J2L (aka VGN-SZ120P)



Dne, 01. 01. 2011 07:28:22 je A. F. Cano napisal(a):
Hello and happy new year,

I'm trying to determine if this Sony Vaio PCG-6J2L, which according to
a web search is "known in the west as VGN-SZ120P", has a bad video card/ chip (Nvidia 7400go) or the problem is a driver issue. The machine has
a partial install of windows and no Sony diagnostics, so I presume the
OS was re-installed on a new disk.  When running windows the machine
starts with some some "garbage" background, the firwmare boot screen is
displayed above the background garbage and when windows finally boots,
the garbage is cleared up and the windows screen is clean/correct but
it doesn't fill the whole screen.

Is this a second-hand laptop or what? Your best and fastest bet is to try out different -- recent -- live CDs (say, a recent Mandriva, SuSE and Ubuntu) and see where they get you. Try selecting different video drivers if available on the CD boot screen. Next step (if they don't get you anywhere) is to reset the laptop's BIOS. By resetting I don't mean just "loading the default values" or similar -- I've seen too many laptops in which just "loading the default values" does nothing to parameters not exposed via the BIOS screen, thus leaving a broken BIOS configuration broken. If there is no way of really resetting the BIOS, perhaps a BIOS update (or even a BIOS downgrade) could do that for you. Anyway, after resetting the BIOS, try the live CDs again. If they still give you issues, your hardware is almost certainly broken (of course, "broken" may mean anything, from just a connector loose somewhere, to serious hardware breakdowns).

--
Cheerio,

Klistvud http://bufferoverflow.tiddlyspot.com Certifiable Loonix User #481801 Please reply to the list, not to me.


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