Posts Tagged ‘Model’

How to fix “Out of Range” resolution problems with NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64/Model 64Pro with BENQ FP61E

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Today I had a task to change an old CRT Monitor to LCD BENQ Model FP61E on a computer running Microsoft Windows XP SP3.

Changing phyiscally the monitors and restarting the computer to load with the new BENQ monitor ended up with the LCD Monitor showing a blank screen with error:

Out of Range

making the computer completely unusable.

Thanksfully in Windows Safe Mode the monitor was able to display the screen properly, so I had an option to operate somehow on the pc

My guess was that the Out of Range monitor problems were caused by an incorrect (monitor unsupported resolution).

Therefore what I tried as a fix to make it work was:

1. Enter Windows Safe Mode and change (lower the resolution) to 640×480, and restart the PC.
Unfortunately using this classical way to fix such issues failed… so I thought of some options.
2. Disable the video card NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64 driver and check if this will make any difference.

I come up with the idea the Out of Range LCD issues might be caused by the Video card driver cause I've noticed in safe mode a standard VESA like VGA Driver shipped with Windows worked just fine.
To Disable the currently loaded NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64/ Model 64Pro I used:

System -> Device Manager -> Hardware (Tab) -> Display Adapters

Clicking on Display Adapters the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64 appears using the option menu on it one can choose to disable the driver.

Further on restart Windows, to test if the XP will load properly with disabled NVidia video drivers.
Onwards it was clear the whole Out of Range issues were caused by some kind of conflict between the LCD BENQ FP61E Monitor and the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64

Often latest video drivers solves hardware incompitability issues and fix many bugs, upgrading the driver to latest is always a good idea.

3. Therefore I Upgraded the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 64 driver (using Safe Mode) to the latest available from Nvidia's official site.

Weirdly Upgrading NVidia Riva TNT2 drivers to the latest did not fix the Out of Range blank screen error.
After a bit of thinking on what to do to make the Monitor work fine with the Nvidia driver, I thought of completely uninstalling the Nvidia drivers and installing them again might be a fix.
In my previous experience with Windows at many occasions, uninstalling a driver failing to properly work and installing it again with a working version was a good fix.

4. Uninstall the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model and Install the latest driver.

Uninstalling and Installing the Video driver had to be done in Windows Safe Mode again, in normal mode the windows was not displaying anything.

After The driver installation program completes the installation it requires a restart. After the restart the Video driver gets loaded fine and Windows loaded up in Normal mode as usual 😉

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Posted in Everyday Life, Windows | No Comments »

Installing hardware RAID monitor on IBM xseries 345 model 8670, IBM Server RAID monitoring via IBM’s RAID software RaidMan on 32 bit (i386) Debian Etch

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Following my prescriptions the company where I work for has bought two hard drives for one of the servers we use for website hosting. The two drives are with capacity of 80GB.

Yesterday I spend part of the day communicating with the tech support in the colocation center in (Evolink) Sofia Thanks God the hardware raid building has been succesfully managed by one of my colleagues working in Evolink.
However he mentioned that some kind of warnings were present in the previous existing RAID 1 array.
To be honest I’ve never thought before about monitoring the RAID array, before the tech support guy suggested to check the warning messages the raid array issues.

To build the hardware array during boot, (Kalin), that’s how the technical support in Evolink is called, he had to download the cd with software for our IBM xseries 8670, and then boot up from the cd
following the instructions in the Server manual to build the array. Anyways that obviously went smoothly as I already mentioned. Taking in consideration his suggestions for monitoring the drives in the RAID array.

I did some research in Google and came across the following Ubuntu’s forums thread Monitoring utility for IBM ServerRAID .
The thread dealt with converting the original RPM package bundled on the IBM software original CD to a deb package in order to make it properly installable and integrated into debian based systems (debian, ubuntu).

Since our current OS of choice on the IBM server is Debian Etch linux, I had the follow the part in the Article from the post dealing with 32 bit rpm package conversion. Everything explained in the forum worked out-of-the-box happily, no settle backs occured. Thus I’ll present the steps here literally required to be partaked to achieve
the proper install of IBM’s hardware monitoring software:

1. Download the IBM ServerRAID application CD from IBM Support's Website
Link to the ISO at the time of writting this post can be obtained from IBM ServerRAID application CD ,

just make sure you use a browser and accept the license agreement before the download proceeds
2. Install the following 3 packages,
# apt-get install alien fakeroot libstdc++5

3. link sort required, cause in Redhat sort is located on a different place
# ln -s /usr/bin/sort /bin/sort

4.Mount the downloaded iso
# mount -o loop ibm_sw_srapp_9.00-16973_anyos_32-64.iso /media/cdrom

5. Copy rpm to /some/directory and convert it to .deb package
# cp /media/cdrom/linux/manager/RaidMan-9.00.i386.rpm /some/directory
# cd /some/directory
# fakeroot alien -c RaidMan-9.00.i386.rpm
Next tweak some scripts to make it Debian/Ubuntu native

6.
# mkdir -p raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN

7.
# dpkg -x raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb raidman_9.00-1_i386/

8.
# dpkg -e raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN

9.
# vim raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN/postinst

10.
# (remove the line containing “chkconfig –add raid_agent”
Next open:
# vim raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN/postrm
# chkconfig –del raid_agent

11.
# dpkg -b raidman_9.00-1_i386/ raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb
12. Now install the new .deb raidman package
# dpkg -i raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb

13. With God’s help everything should go smoothly and now you should have
a working raid monitoring software on your Debian Server
To start the raid agent issue the command:

# /etc/init.d/raid_agent start

Here is also a download link to raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb

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Posted in System Administration | 5 Comments »