[gentoo-user] [OT] Laptop graphics card broken??

[José González Gómez]

Sorry for the off track, but I'm totally lost regarding this, and I thought
maybe somebody could shed some light on this...

I've got an Acer Aspire 1520 with an NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700 and a dual
Gentoo Linux/Windows install. The problem is that the graphics card seems to
be broken, at least partially: whenever I start the laptop the screen is
off, and here comes the weird part, if I select Gentoo from the grub boot (I
know where the options are, so I can select it even with the screen off) the
screen keeps off, but if I select Windows, the screen gets on, but only when
Windows reach the login screen, not before. By the way, the laptop fell some
time ago from around a meter high, but after that kept on working, although
I had some sporadic hangs on Linux, with the screen showing kind of light
snow noise, almost always playing Battle of Wesnoth.

The only logical explanation I can think of, unless I'm totally retarded and
missing something clearly obvious, is that the card (or the screen) seems to
be working only at some resolution/color depth/frequency combination (
1280x800@60, 32bit), and that I'm not using the working combination at
Linux, but this seems really strange and I haven't heard of anything like
this before.

Anyone has any idea on this? What could I check to further diagnose the
problem? Any solution? Am I missing anything?????

Thanks in advance, best regards
Jose