What's the reason that the Acer's screen will show such a strange pattern before logging in?

This happened from time to time on my 10.5 retail installation.
Now I had to re-install the Acer from scratch but the screen appears again and again in these situations:

- Leo4allv3 final - first reboot after setup
- Retail 10.5.6 (Boot-132 generic + Retail 10.5.6 disk)


Any help is appreciated. Thanks.


edit:
The specs:
Graphics: Intel X3100 / 1280x800 15.4"
CPU: Intel Celeron M
HDD: SATA 120GB
DVD: SATA
RAM: 1GB DDR2

You could start with telling what grapichs card there is in your Acer so people that want to help dont have to start with getting the infomation... That really put people off.

Right, thanks for reminding me.

The short answer is I don't know. The longer winded answer is I used to get screen corruptions during boot up with my Acer Aspire 4720z, similar spec, if one of the USB ports had a device that wasn't quite fully plugged in or if a faulty USB drive or device was attached. Swapping over to a different port seemed to help. The screen corruption problem seemed to go away with later 10.5.x builds, however. I would try and find out what additional kexts 5220 users are using. Usually problems experienced by one owner are experienced by many.

One of the longer Acer laptop threads that you might care to wade through or ask questions in.

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...amp;mode=linear

I didn't know that link, thanks!

Eventually I installed the latest Iatkos Release (7i) which worked for me OOTB. I tried both X3100 kexts for the graphics but both show up the corrupted screen on about every 4th boot.

Some things to try.

First off - and I'm assuming from your mention of retail that you have purchased Leopard, are using Iatkos because of its round up of useful drivers - when you install, DON'T put a tick in the GMA X3100 driver's checkbox; don't select a graphics driver at all; the default driver works on Acers whereas the modified ones are aimed more at Dell owners, etc. That might solve your problem right there.

There is also quite a long 5220 thread on insanelymac that is worth hunting out.

I will try and look over the weekend at what additional kexts I installed on my 4720z, though a different model from yours. Most of the problems that I ever had on the 4720z related to USB. See if you can find Slice's USB2 kext; I'm not sure if that's the one that did it for me. Also, with the 4720z my bootup was flakey; only one in four boots got past the boot screen - but this was solved with the Chameleon bootloader V2 and, again, related to a USB problem!