Thanks to all who responded:
Fereydoun Tavangary <ft@SSD.intel.com>
Robert Bonomi <bonomi@delta.eecs.nwu.edu>
searle@pts.mot.com (Stephen Searle X3464 P7877)
This is a known problem. Old two-slot GX cards and the new Sony 19"
monitors don't get along together. The solution (excerpted from the
message bonomi@delta.eecs.nwu.edusent):
disconnect the 13W3 cable from the GX card; power off; wait 15
sec (aprox.); puwer on; wait till the 'idiot light' on the
front of the chassis starts blinking; plug the 13W3 back in
Stephen surmised that the old GX cards are hunting for a 66Hz monitor,
but he wasn't sure.
I ended up swapping in a single-slot GX card that was my hot spare.
Many thanks again go out to the group.
Anthony Yen - SPARC Sysadmin - Department of Economics - UT/Austin
ECB 3.138, MS#63100 - 471-3211 ext 170 - tyen@mundo.eco.utexas.edu
The original message:
>Question: Is there a difference between a Sun GDM-1962B and GDM-1962
> (i.e., no "B" postfix) monitor?
>
>Background:
>
>I have a SPARCstation 2's with the old 2-slot GX [1] card running
>SunOS 4.1.3 with 16Mb RAM and 207Mb HD. When I hook it up to a Sun
>GDM-1962B monitor, the box boots up with vertical bars across the
>screen [2]. When I hook it up to a GDM-1962 monitor, this phenomena
>disappears.
>
>Now for the _really_ strange part, which drove me half-crazy during
>the troubleshooting phase. If I get the vertical bars and then move
>the box to the non-vertical bar monitor, sometimes (but not always)
>the vertical bars persist until I:
>
> - Open the box and reseat the graphics card.
> - Power cycle several times.
> - Pray.
> - Any combination of the above.
> - None of the above (i.e., come back the next day and it's
> automagically fixed itself).
>
>This is my guess, but I need something more definitive before I spend
>money to fix this: the old two-slot GX card won't work with the new
>19" monitors, and some bizzare interaction between the two leads to
>the persistence phenomena. The only solution that I see is to get a
>newer one-slot GX card and toss the old two-slot one (what an awful
>waste of money!). I'm handy with a soldering iron and schematics, so
>if someone knows of a hardware fix for this I'd be capable and
>grateful (it's worth a shot if the only other option is to toss it).
>
>I'll summarize back to the group.
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:08:16 CDT