Solved: Raspberry Pi Wrong Resolution

Raspberry Pi 2Anxious to test the new Raspberry Pi 2‘s performance, I breezed through NOOBS Setup without paying a huge amount of attention or making many changes to the default setup. And the new quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and 1GB of RAM did not disappoint: starting X and loading web pages on the included browser was a delight compared to my original 256MB rev1 board; but what bothered me after the initial excitement of increased performance was a large black border around the desktop, which prevented the full 1920×1080 pixels from being utilized, and LXRandR was reporting a somewhat bizarre resolution of 1776×952.

I do not recall encountering anything like this with my rev1 B, or my daughter’s B+ (although the latter is running Kano rather than Raspbian), and some quick searching (on the Pi itself – the vastly less painful browsing really has been a revelation!) turned up various solutions or suggestions of how to adjust incorrectly-detected/set resolutions. Unfortunately, my experience did not seem to match solutions such as those described by @bleroy as to how he fixed his Pi resolution on his Samsung monitor – in fact, no changes I made to /boot/config.txt seemed to be having any effect at all.

I took a step back and instead of trying to get full 1080p, attempted to force a lower resolution by uncommenting the included example:

framebuffer_width=1280
framebuffer_height=720

hrm, Markdown code blocks don’t appear to be working?

and for the first time, saw a result! But to my dismay, X still retained that giant black border! No amount of tweaking the obvious settings such as disable_overscan and overscan_* seemed to make a bit of difference though, until…I scrolled down to find:

# NOOBS Auto-generated Settings:

and a duplicate set of all of the settings that I’d been trying to change, which had just been clobbered all along by NOOBS setup! Commenting out the duplicate disable_overscan and overscan_* settings allowed my original changes to take effect (after one last restart) and I am now able to enjoy 1920×1080 resolution in addition to the new significant performance boost of the RPi2! □_ヘ(^_^ヘ)

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