Display went haywire

I assume that when you say "I was going to reinstall, but the reinstall looked this way ..." that you booted from the install disk and the problem persisted.

Given that fact, it is unlikely that your problem is software related. You are likely experiencing a hardware problem.

At this point, you really ought to take your MBP in to an authorized Apple repair location. This is a fixable problem (involves replacing the motherboard).

I just had this exact same problem happen to me. The first time it happened, it went back to normal, but happened again the next day. My external monitor is fine.

Did anyone find any more information on this?

Did you try resetting PRAM? Hold down apple, option, p and r all at the same time before startup. Wait for the 2nd boot chime and let go. Let us know if it works. I have seen this a few times on different machines and this seems to clear it up. Normally the resolution is the same and only the colors are messed up though, so your situation may be different.

The technical term “haywire” says it all, and it really does appear to be a hardware problem. Perhaps it’s a defective raster, or some other video circuitry of some sort. Contact AppleCare today and file an incident report and go from there.
Regards,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm happy to say that this worked for me. It was not an issue with changed resolution, it was a color issue. Not reversed colors, just really, really wrong colors. Psychedelic is a good description.

I don't know if it is possible that it is related to boot camp or Parallels, but the only changes made to the system prior to this happening was an upgrade to boot camp 1.3, and an upgrade to Parallels to the latest version.

Regardless, I hope it doesn't happen again.

Same problem, display went psychedelic, occured for first time trying to install a windows game "pacific fighters" in parallels, install didn't finish and then display went weird colours reversed out and crawling ants outlines around colour shapes.

I had just installed parallels 3 and parallels latest update and bootcamp 1.3.

zapping the pram fixes the problem for a while but it recurs on what seems to be a random basis, I can't see anything in particular which is causing the problem.

when the screen is misdisplaying it continues to do so while starting up from external disks and from the original install disks. zapping the pram is the only cure that I have found.

Think you should take your "haywire" machine back to the store and ask for a exchange; defo sounds like a hardware glitch to me.



I'd say all the thermal paste Apple smothered the chip in, has finally cause a problem with the display... maybe Apple will learn?

My MBP did the same thing after installing Boot Camp 1.3 and then restarting a couple times. (Didn't happen the first time I rebooted after the installation.) I was hoping it wasn't a hardware problem because it went haywire, then restarted once normally, then went back to "haywire" status. I was just about to try a SMC reset, and then I found this post, and the PRAM reset worked for me!

I really hope this isn't a hardware problem, as my computer is out of warranty. But my gut is telling me this problem is going to come back and the current solution is only temporary. However, I do think it is a good thing that the problem is linked to dual booting windows, cause that points more to software corruption than to hardware failure.

MacBook Pro (2.0ghz); iBook (500mhzG3 Dual USB) Mac OS X (10.4.5)

I too have seen this problem and I posted some images I took in a new thread I created before finding this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1065874&tstart=0

At first the issue seemed to be related to installing updates that required a reboot, but that was likely just when I noticed it because those were the only times I ever rebooted. Now the problem has become more frequent and it doesn't matter why I reboot. I can reboot for any reason and about 50% of the time I get the psychedelic colors. A PRAM reset always sets things right, but It's a real pain because I use an open firmware password which I must disabled before I can reset the PRAM. I've tried leaving the open firmware password disabled, but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

FYI, I am running boot camp 1.4 and have all the latest EFI and SMC updates installed. I've also installed and since removed both VM Ware and the Parallels demos.

If anyone knows a fix for this, please let me know.

Exact same problem here after a macbook pro battery software update. Psychedelic really is the right word. I looked like the machine was tripping on acid. Like it was displaying the 24bit color values truncated in an 8bit register. I was about to put on some house music and go with it, but the option-cmd-p-r pram reset fixed it. It's not a hardware issue, just a corrupted pram setting evidently.