OS 10.5 - imac with mini-DVI to VGA no longer sees second display in leopard.
Hi to the masses.
I need help. I've recently taken the plunge and upgraded my mac to a refurbed 24" imac (the end of line white ones, not the nice new expensive metal ones).
I bought with the imac a copy of leopard, as it was sold with tiger, and also a mini-dvi to VGA converter to run a second display. After unpacking the imac, and connecting the second display everything was fine. I was advised not to go through the setup procedure but instead to immediately put leopard in the the drive and reboot (holding down the C key). This was the start of my problems.
On reboot the imac made it past the apple logo and then to a blue screen, which eventually turned grey, and then stopped there. All i can see is the cursor.
so i thought i'd take the disk out and reboot to proceed through the tiger setup, just in case there's something leopard needed to install (clutching at straws). Tiger booted and set up perfectly showing the second display. i was very impressed with the 24" display AND my 19" crt monitor working hard to extend the desktop..... loads of room!!
so i thought, well i'll try again with leopard. Noop. same problem. Having done these things before i decided to take the imac back to it's 'out of the box' state and disconnect everything that didn't come with it. Namely the second monitor.... bingo. It then continued through to the installer.
the leopard install went well after that, but as soon as i connected the second monitor back up the imac wont restart, showing the same symptoms as when trying to install. I tried connecting the monitor while leopard was running and trying to detect the display, but still no joy. Doing this, the second monitor shows a blue screen, but the displays preference panel doesn't show the 'arrange' tab, neither does the mac info panel say there's a second monitor attached. Also the second display looks like it's out of phase or a very low htz setting...?
now, this is where it gets weird. I then installed the EFI bootrom 1.2 upgrade thingy. this went through it's install perfectly and rebooted. I had the second display disconnected at this point. when the reboot had completed, i tried connecting the second display. HEY! that worked. the OS could see the second display and i could change all it's settings and extend the desktop etc. perfect. i was a happy camper! so i then proceeded to set the rest of the mac up as i wanted leaving the mac in a sleep state overnight.
I also have an external networked HD which worked fine yesterday, but this morning after waking up the mac, leopard could no longer connect to it. even clicking the 'connect as' button wouldn't work. so i did a restart........... and guess what! now the second display wont work again!
I'm tried rebooting, i've tried connecting it with the mac already on and nothing. I've checked and the bootrom still shows the latest version, so it's nothing to do with that... i don't think. but anyway, now i'm screwed. i don't know what else to try apart from ring apple. last resort!!
HELP!!!!! am i doing anything stupid? should i just go back to tiger (not having seen anything in leopard that is overly impressive [sorry])
If i can't fix this, i'm going to have to reinstall and waste more hours resetting up tiger.....
Mac Specs: 2xiMac24 w Parallels (1x White, 1x Aluminum)
Just some feedback. I have 2 very similar installs to you - White 24 with DVI to monitor and Alum 24 with VGA to monitor. Neither have Leopard so that may be the difference.
Neither of my setups have this issue and I just dead started my White 24 with DVI and did not get the startup issue you mentioned. It could be a Leopard thing.
I believe the problem to be with leopard. I had tiger originaly installed on the imac and it ran perfect. it was only once i'd installed leopard that i started having trouble.
Fingers crossed the 10.5.2 update will fix the problem.
OS 10.5 - imac with mini-DVI to VGA no longer sees second display in leopard.
