[smd3]

I was logged in and I changed my display settings on my MDD machine. I went from 1280x1204 to 1600x1200. screen went black, now I can't get it back. I've tried clearing the PRAM.

Please help.

It's a standard CRT hooked up using DV to VGA cable.

[CrecenS]

Can you boot into your system at all and see stuff (like through a disk), or are you totally blacked out? When you reboot, when does the system go black?

[smd3]

The computer would start up with the screen black. Zapping the PRAM, as per Apple tech support, yielded the gray start up screen. When it would switch to the OSX startup screen it would again go black.

The cure was to restart holding the shift key. A sort of safe mode as stated by the tech support.

I had to resort to calling tech support, I couldn't find the answer online.

Thanks for the help, maybe this will help someone else.

[CrecenS]

So you started up in safe mode, and did what to fix it? Did you have to reset your monitor settings to get everything looking right?

I had this problem once, but I had a gray screen instead of a black screen. The problem was the settings cache for my monitor was different in OS9 than it was in OSX. I had to delete the file to see my desktop again.