Power Failure Caused Video Problems ....

Power Failure Caused Video Problems ....

Yesterday our neighbor was messing around with the circuit breakers and cut the power to our dining room, which turned off my external HD.

I can still boot from the external HD, but there is a serious video problem now. I'm still online with the external HD, but having visual difficulty with certain things (buttons, links, scroll tabs, and pictures are really bad quality, e-mail hard to see ...).

I can still boot from the internal HD (iBook G4), and the video is just fine. So the problem doesn't seem to be with the iBook's video card.

I reinstalled Tiger (10.4) on the external HD, but still have the same problem.

I ran Disk Warrior and Disk Utility, but still have the same problem.

Any ideas what might be the problem, and how to fix it?

Strangest thing happened today .... I pressed Escape and the video on my iBook is back to normal ... !!!

Why would the video have been messed up, and I only needed to press Escape to get the video back to normal ... ???