Just transferred my hard drive from dead t20 to "new" t20. Windows 98se loads fine, except monitor goes blank in normal boot sequence, but is fine in safe mode. (Trust me, I know windows has loaded even though I have no screen view in normal mode). I've tried a number of solutions suggested in these and other posts, but nothing has worked so far.

from what you say, it appears that you have transferred a HD from one machine to another. I do not think this will work since the hardware in the two machines is different. Windows has been configured to work with the hardware in the original machine and will complain or get stuck when run on a different machine. Ideally, you should reinstall windows. However, you can try uninstalling ALL devices (i mean everything!) from safe mode. When you boot normally the next time, each device will be recognized and the appropriate drivers will be installed. Before you attempt this, or a re installation, make sure you have the windows installation CD, and any CDs or other media that came with your hardware it will also be helpful if you let us know what other solution you have tried (but failed) i've switched to Linux!

From safe mode open 'display properties', then 'settings'. It should show a screen area of 640 x 480 and 16 colors. Click 'apply' and 'OK'. It should give you a message that you're changing the settings for normal mode. Click to confirm that. Then shut down and restart in normal mode. It should boot OK to the desktop. Then you need to figure out what happened. Since they were both the same laptop the video drivers should be the same, or was one of the laptops using an external monitor? Check in device manager and see if it shows a problem with the video adapter. If so you may need to reinstall the video drivers. If not, try the recommended video settings for the laptop.

The problem appears to be that the video chip is not the same as Windows recognizes from the previous installation on the hard drive I transferred to the new machine. It says it found driver and installed it, but problem remains. At one point, I was able to boot to normal screen, but resolution remained at 16 colors and 640 x 480res. Is it possible that windows recognizes a video adapter from the old t20 whcih is not the actual adapter I have now? Please note that this is the only issue I seem to have. Thanks for your help!

I would think the video chip would be the same but regardless, it's best to reinstall the video drivers. It looks like all the drivers are here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s... There's a lot of downloads there. Just install the video drivers and see if it works OK then.

The only time this happened to me I discovered that somehow the refresh rate got moved from the normal "Adapter default" to "Optimum" setting. I still have a hard time believing it, but that was it. I set it back and no more problems. Your mileage might vary wildly. Right click Desktop, select Properties|Settings Tab|Advanced box|Adapter Tab. Select refresh rate from choices available. Even these routing instructions and/or choices available for refresh rates may be different for your machine depending on what hardware you have and what drivers Windows has installed for it. Lee

The problem has been resolved! Loaded the correct driver in safe mode, then selected the correct monitor resolution (after disabling adapter in device manager in safe mode, was able to reboot to normal mode where screen res. was changed). I wish to thank everyone who offered their assistance - it was all helpful.