Rescuing your display from resolution despair under Mac OS X

If you have a non-Apple display connected to your Mac, you may have (or may in the future) experienced a problem where the message "frequency out of range" is displayed at startup, and the monitor becomes unusable. This usually happens when you are experimenting with different screen resolutions, and your display becomes stuck on a setting it cannot properly handle.

In order to work around this problem under Mac OS X, you will need to delete the file System/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist, which contains resolution and other display settings.

However, it is obviously impossible to navigate to and delete this file when your display is devoid of information. There are a couple of options for getting around this issue:

• If you have a Mac OS 9 installation on your drive, hold down the "option" key during startup to boot into the Classic Mac OS (assuming your monitor preferences are not incorrect there too), navigate to the com.apple.windowserver.plist file, delete it, and restart into Mac OS X.
• Boot into Single User mode by holding down the "Command" and "S" keys in tandem during startup. This will present you with a terminal prompt, from which you can delete the file using the command "rm NameOfDisk/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist" (rm is the UNIX command used to remove or delete files)
• Use FireWire target disk mode by connecting the problematic Mac to another via a male-to-male FireWire cable and holding down the "T" key on the target system during startup. Then navigate to the com.apple.windowserver.plist file on the system with a working display setting and delete it.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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