cinema display recognized, but black with non-working power button

We just purchased 23" Cinema displays for our Dual PowerPC G5s. We have a ATI Radeon 9600 pro graphics card that requires a DVI adapter for the second slot. We have newer computers with dual DVI graphics cards, and that seems to be working just fine. An updated Radeon 9600 w/ dual DVI cost about $100.

Hopefully this will help...

I found this and it worked for me I guess whats important is to zero the info on screens so that it resets - I did the below its important to start up with apple "s" - write the code below - worked right - I had tried to trash the window plist file manually and that didn t work but starting in safe mode did - hope this helps

http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n106564


Method 2

This works when Mac OS 9 is not available on the computer's hard disk or on a CD-ROM disc.

Warning: This section involves use of the "rm" command. Be sure to type the commands exactly. Typographical error when using the rm command could result in severe data loss, up to and including all information on the computer. To verify characters and spacing, you may copy and paste the text from your web browser into a text editor, such as TextEdit.

1. Start up in single user mode by pressing and holding the Command-S key combination when you turn on the computer.
2. At the prompt, type: mount -uw /
3. Press Return.
4. Type: rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist
5. Press Return.
6. Type: reboot
7. Press Return.


When the computer restarts the preference is recreated with default settings.

First day out of the box, half an hour after a relatively easy set up and I had a black screen incident on my 30 inch display. The display was black, the power light not lit yet the display was recognized and the mouse disappeared into the black hole.

Having an attack of increasing hypertension I found this forum. I followed the comments about rapidly plugging and unplugging the power lead. On the third attempt the screen came back to life, the power light remains unlit.

Interesting. Thank goodness for the Sale of Goods Act because I reckon this comes under the "not of merchantable quality" phrase which gives us UK consumers protection against shoddy workmanship, which this undoubtedly is. I will contact Apple tomorrow and ask their opinion.

Chiming back in!

Just to let you all know. Doing absolutely nothing seems to have helped me. Or rather, the issue appears to have resolved itself. Everyone, myself included, believs this all to be a software issue where an update had caused this then later resolved this. Not sure which update, although many seem to be blaming a itunes version...

Will let you all know if I encounter any other issues.

J

I have a 11 month old quad intel power mac and 23 inch cinema display with exactly the problems you all are describing. This started happening a few weeks ago. Unpluging and repluging the power - either at the brick or at the outlet - has always done the trick before. But it has been a few hours now, and it is totally unresponsive. I use the system daily in XP under bootcamp and nightly in OS X. Both have this problem. I have had this system for just under a year. So I hope I can get this fixed. What I am hearing here is not encouraging...

my last Hitatchi enormous 21 inch crt lasted me almost 10 years. And I shipped it over seas and back and to 4 apartments. I really hope there is a solution to this.

Following up previous post..

I left my machine on for hours last night. The monitor did not come back on by itself - nor respond to the power button. I shut things down for the night, and the next morning everything worked "fine" again.

My latest theory is that it is a problem with the power saving logic or circuitry of the display. This problem will reset itself only when it's not receiving a display signal from a video card. The problem occurs only when the software of the operating system "puts" the display in power save mode. On both OSX and XP this results in a monitor that becomes unresponsive.

Based on that theory here's my fix. I disable the power save feature in the os. Just turn the monitor power down timeout to never. Make sure that you have a screen saver to prevent burn in. And then power down the monitor manually on the side when needed.

I've been testing this today and so far so good. When I went to lunch I powered down the monitor with the switch on the side. Turned it on quickly just to make sure my day wasn't shot again, and turned it off. Went to lunch, the **** thing turned itself back on. Left my machine on btw - also in never sleep mode. Turned it off again, went to have some coffee and watch some news. Came back and it was on again. I think the monitor is just really confused. But at least it comes on now. Now I only have to worry about the power bill...

I'll keep you all updated if my theory doesn't hold water. Or I'm sure you all will let me know:)

Mine will occaisionally do that as well: turn itself on moments after I have turned it off using the side switch...

I have not changed the power saver settings as my setup is now working (for the most part - minus the symptoms you are referring to.)

SO! In essence I am saying my monitor is behaving the *_same exact way_ without* me changing the power settings as you did!! Weird Huh!?

I'm still thinking it's a software update thing as everyone seems to be experiencing the same thing everywhere at the same time regardless of 'fix it's

This same problem just happened to me. I was working on my computer with both monitors working then the firmware update popped up. I followed the instructions and restarted when it came back on only one monitor is working. Tried unplugging switching the port on the graphics card, and that is not the problem. SO from what I have been reading it seems to be a firmware update issue. Anyway to go back before the firmware update?

I too had this issue, starting last week after a software update. I am running two 23" displays on a MacPro that is running 10.4.10.

Someone earlier mentioned resetting System Management Controller (SMC) to solve this problem:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304123

I went back to the software update control panel and noticed that Apple was offering a "Mac Pro SMC Firmware Update." I thought this was fishy - maybe Apple saw the issue and offering a fix. I did three things that seem to have fixed the issue:

1) Installed the Mac Pro SMC Firmware Update
2) dumped and reinstalled the freshest iTunes and QuickTime
3) followed the directions to reset the SMC at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304123

Everything appears to be working well now.

The SMC reset doesn't work for me. (I've the same problem).

My screen put around 5 minutes to wake up. And sometimes, the screen scintillates and finish the wake up after touchin some (+/-) buttons.

People who tried with a new Power Brick : did it solve the problem ? For 60$, it could be the best solution for me.... (don't have time to open the Mac every hour :-p)

I started seeing this problem a couple of weeks ago. I have a 23" Cinema display hooked up to a PowerBook G4. Most of the time I use the display with the laptop lid closed. Since this problem started I've had the laptop lid open a bit more and have either used Mirroring or the extended desktop.

I can usually detect the display just fine, but I don't get the options tab all the time letting me select what the power button does. Usually this tab appears just before the display will come on. I've also had the detect display give me the spinning circle and then nothing works and I have to reboot.

At first I thought it was a hardware problem with the power brick. Unplugging and plugging in the power cord to the brick seemed to fix the problems, but now that no longer always works.

If I mirror the displays after a few minutes the Cinema Display magically starts working. If I close the lid the laptop goes to sleep. Hitting the external keyboard wakes it up and sometime I get lucky and the display comes back to life. I had situations where both displays are gone and a hard reboot is the only way to get the laptop display to come back on (even removing the display connector) from the laptop won't wake the display up.

I'm starting to feel it's more of a software issue than a hardware issue. Display works fine when hooked up to a PC.

See my last post. It really did work folks. I had one instance of it happening again, but now I have been working for days without instance. And I work my machines to death - on/off, sleep/wake, bleep/blop...

One thing, ...I am pretty disappointed with Apple over this. My first machine was an Apple I, so I am not about to jump ship, but this issue *****. For every post in this board you can be assured that there are hundreds of people with the same issue.

Next time you visit the Apple store (all of you), take a printout of this thread with you to the Genius who's working.

Mine is failing with my MacBook Pro and my wife's Gateway (XP) so this can't be solely a firmware/mac issue, there is something more fundmental involved because the machine/video card OS are not common across this problem. The monitor/power supply are. I'm going to try the sleep/power saving settngs but again the monitor and power supply are the base commonality in this thread.

For what it's worth my 12 month old 23" Cinema HD Display attached to a Mac Mini 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo started with this black screen out of sleep just yesterday. I attached an older Samsung 193P to the mini and it works fine. Crazy

I reseting the PMU (intel only has the SMC) and followed detalspark's last post. Still have the problem.