T40 / Radeon 9000 / vertical stripes instead of display

[damehex]

Hi -- if anyone has a bright idea, please post.

My display went stripey on me a few days ago, fixed itself after about 10 reboots, then freaked out again today and won't come back. In between, I ran the latest version of PC-Doctor for Windows, which only seemed to do a memory test for the Radeon. Both times when it's gone into stripe mode, it has been during Direct3D apps (games).

At power-up/POST, when it should display a splash screen of the IBM Thinkpad logo, I get a black screen with 6 or so 1-pixel-wide vertical green lines. It proceeds to the Windows XP loading screen (I guess) but displays a full screen of wide vertical bars flashing about once a second between brown and light blue. Then the screen blanks and fades up (as it does when bringing up the big blue "welcome" login screen for XP) but instead of the welcome screen there's a repeating pattern of wide vertical white bars and multicolored vertical thin stripes. Moving the mouse causes a little bit of screen static.

Can't try anything from within Windows because I can't log in. Some part of the system freezes after hitting the welcome screen -- the caps indicator light and the wireless light wake up and the 100baseT card sends DHCPDISCOVER to the router but ignores the responding DHCPOFFER -- so I can't even get in with Remote Desktop. Tried about a hundred times to blindly click on my login, but have never heard the windows init sound.

The system will spontaneously reboot if I fiddle with the Fn-F7 (switch displays) key combo for a while.

Would love to solve this problem, since the cheapest replacement is $600 for a new system board w/ integrated Radeon.

Don't think it's a driver problem, because this is happening at POST and boot.

Saw a couple people suggesting that a feshly written GPU BIOS helps, but I would need something that boots from a CD and blindly installs itself... (no floppy on the system). Is there anything I could hack together that would do that? I have not even been able to find BIOS files for this card (Mobility Radeon 9000 32MB).

Using:
IBM Thinkpad T40 2373-XXE (refurb of the 2373-91U + extras)
system-board-integrated Radeon 9000 (32 MB)

With drivers:
8.062.2-041023m-019104C-IBM or maybe 8.102-050201a-020938C-IBM
when the problem happened Friday and
8.102.1-050224m-021425C-IBM
when it happened today (Monday).

Things I've tried already:
leaving it off for several hours
switching to an external display (shows the same stripes)
getting into the bios (the screen changes but does not display anything other than colorful vert stripes)
using the Fn-F7 display switching combo for hours on end (seemed to lead to its revival on Friday).

Thanks and more thanks to anyone who takes the time to read that whole post! Eternal gratitude to anyone who can help.

[NaT]

If I understand you correctly, you said that even at power-on stage, there is a vertical white stripe appear in the IBM logo boot up?

That'd be the hardware error and you should get it repaired. I had the similar problem with the thinkpad but that mine never went blank at all; the white vertical stripe (or red stripe) stick on the screen all the time while the system is powered on

[jparr]

Welcome to the club. You most likely need a new motherboard. Mine started that way, and then over the period of a week, progressed until it would not even power on.

[RS_003]

I had an Travelmate 800CLi (broke down 9 times, and got 2 new ones... yay for acer ) and on time the 9000 broke. Just when starting up a light 3d AP.

Since then i Got MAJOR artifacts, seems the 9000 mobile chipset is just a [censored]. Tough luck