Vertical lines on screen

[copespeak]

My Laptop was in tip top condition after a recent reformat. Antivirus is up to date, and nothing shows on scans.

The screen went a cream colour with fine vertical coloured lines. I shut it down and started up again and it worked without problem for two days. Yesterday it happened again, and after a shutdown it started with lots of changing lines, horizontal and vertical.

I have a Toshiba factory reformat disc and did that last night, with no improvement. I have really bitten the bullet and am scrubbing the hard drive with that option on my disc. It has taken all night and hopefully will finish in a couple of hours. The Toshiba Window is up now showing the progress, but with a watermark of these lines.

It is not looking good. I am not an expert, just self taught when I need to learn something. I am assuming it is something to do with the display?

[Hopester Doofus]

If there is no physical damage to the screen itself, or to the connection on the motherboard that the screen plugs into, the display should appear normal before you get to the Windows loading screen. Is this the case?

[copespeak]

Yes, there is no sign of the lines when I try to reload everything. That's why I thought I would scrub everything. But they ARE still there.

As a rank amateur, but a trier, I tried to reinstall via the factory disc, but it says I haven't initialized the drive and halts the process.  I went into some sites where they said to hold the 'c' key down until the logo appears, which I did, but I still end up in the same place. It says that on the Toshiba Qosmio disc also, which worked when I reformatted, but not since the hard drive scrub.

Thanks for answering.

[mr_skipper24]

Steps in running the recovery disk

1. insert the 1st CD
2. turn off the notebook
3. power ON the notebook then press and hold down the 'C' key
4. once you heard the beep sound let go of the 'C' key and the recovery will start.
5. select toshiba recovery wizzard
6. then out of box

[copespeak]

It did progress, even though it said it wasn't initialized. Thanks for your input. It looks like it will install OK, but the lines are still there, and it may not work as it didn't before this reformat.

My laptop is 18 months old, and has never been dropped or damaged. The screen doesn't show these lines when the Ram Disc was loading.

[copespeak]

OK, now it's finished. It started up, showed the windows logo, complete with lines, the screen went black, and nothing........, then a blue screen saying there is a problem, but doesn't stay long enough for me to read (can I hit a key to make it stay?). Then it restarts again and repeats the same miserable routine.

It might have to go off to someone with more knowledge............

[copespeak]

I'm still trying.....

I have installed the recovery disc, but it began to loop, starting up, putting out error messages, then shutting down again. The message came up for only a second, so I photographed it, performed OCR and came up with this .... (see error message below)

...."A problem has been detected and Windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.
The problem seems to be caused by the following file: nv4_disp

If this is the first time you have seen this stop error screen, restart your computer.
If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
The device driver got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates problem with the device itself or with the driver programming the hardware incorrectly.
please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.
Technical information:
   •• STOP: Ox000000EA (Ox8676CO20, Ox85412430, 0xF7CA4CBC, 0x00000001)
nv4_disp"

I have looked up Toshiba for drivers, but have no idea what to look for. The lines are still there, but not at particular points of operation, showing the screen is not faulty.

Anybody out there can help?

[patio]

STOP: Ox000000EA Thread stuck in device driver:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=293078&sd=RMVP

Are those the original Toshiba discs for that machine ? ?

[copespeak]

Hi, thanks for replying. I'm in Australia, so if I am delayed in replying, the time difference will be the reason.

Yes, the discs are Toshiba factory discs. I did get a message after I ran them again that it hadn't installed properly. Might this be that the HDD wasn't initialized properly, or do I run them again? I cannot operate the computer past trying to get it up and then looping.

[patio]

Trying again may be the only option at this point...if they are CD's try cleaning them with a soft lint-free cloth.

No worry about the time difference.

[copespeak]

I did run them again with the same result. It's not recognising the hard drive. I have a friend who is going to talk me through checking the bios page today, which has taken me a while to find out how to get into that. Why do they all have different methods for different models? Like having different gauge railway lines in different states of Oz..........

[patio]

That's about the size of it unfortunately...

[copespeak]

OK, I have got the hard drives organised. I have downloaded the display driver necessary on my old pooter, started the laptop in safe mode (F8 for Toshiba Qosmio G35), installed it, and nothing has improved. A bit sad.

For anyone interested, to get into the BIOS screen is is Power On, press "ESC", and then "F1" when prompted.

I have put it to bed for a while in the hopes that a magic wand will wave over it and all will be well.

In Safe Mode, it works fine. Anyone wants to offer thoughts, they would be gratefully received........

[patio]

Where are you getting the display driver from ? ?
If it looks OK in safemode then the generic Windows driver works better than the one installed.
I'm still convinced this is a driver issue.

[copespeak]

Yes, it is certainly a driver issue, because it looks OK some of the time.

I got a Nvidia driver (with nv4_disp) that was supposed to be compatible with my setup (XP Media Center).

Somewhere in the depths of the messages I saw today that I had to disable the other driver? Wouldn't you have no display then?

I am now having a try at running the factory formatting back through again, starting in Safe Mode, then accessing my Norton Ghost from my external drive and pasting it back in