Laptop Help

My dad was updating his computer and the laptop froze during the installation. And now all you get is a blank screen when you turn on the computer and it does aynthing else. Anyone of a way to fix this?

Boot from the CD.

Here's a bit more info, It has xp service pack 3 installed. And I have tried booting from CD and nothing happens. It's still just a blank screen.

first off, plug it into the wall for all of this, with laptops you can never depend on battery power when troubleshooting them.

do all the fans come on and everything when you turn it on? does it beep or anything unusual that it normally doesn't do when it boots.

Freezing while installing the OS sounds like harddrive or CDrom failure but that shouldn't result in a black screen.

If its a hard drive failure you should still get some warning text about disk boot failure, not a blank screen.

You should hook it up to an external monitor, possibly the display died. Some laptops have a button you need to press to get it to go to an external monitor, some don't you might want to check the manual.

Does the back lighting on the screen come on even thought it stays black. Turn it on in a dark room and see if you can tell if the screen glows (yes, they will kind of glow black, its a good way to check the back lighting even if nothing else shows up on the screen.)

If the back lighting doesn't turn on try starting it up and go outside in the sun and look at the screen at all different angles, sometimes if the inverter for the back light dies you can't see anything until you get the screen in really bright light, then you can kind of see whats on the screen, enough to know its working.

If the fans come on, and the back lighting comes on but nothing shows up it might be a dead video card (you usually can't replace them in laptops, so your screwed, or you get a new motherboard)

If the back lighting is dead you can buy replacement inverters for laptop screens by model, they are like $80 but better than buying a new screen.

If the fans come on and there is no backlighting and nothing onscreen even in bright light then your probably also screwed and some hardware has failed.


The easily replaceable hardware that could fail will result in a boot error, which should appear when you try to boot, not a blank screen.

Additionally, if there is more than one stick of memory in there try booting with just one, or just the other. try them in both slots. if one of your sticks went bad that might be it.


hope that helps.

It sounds like either the Motherboard, HDD, or OS. Your description of the problem isn't very, well, descriptive. Do you get any kind of image when booting up the computer? Can you get into the BIOS? I would do like the above post says and plug in the power cord, take the battery completely out too. Sometimes bad batteries can cause a computer not to boot even if it is plugged in.

I've tried it with the battery in and the battery out, and plugged into the wall. I hooked it up to a monitor and nothing happened, that's the first thing I did when the screen stayed black. When you turn it on you can hear a fan turn on and that's about it. No beeps or anything so I'm guessing it's not making the bios check. The screen gets no back light at all it just stays a black blank screen.

The computer has been having major problems lately with freezing up randomly. I've formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP. I ran some virus programs which found a couple of trojans but got rid of them. The freezing still occurred.

If you don't get beeps and no monitor output, it sounds like perhaps the mobo is hosed.

elios_kenni said:

I've tried it with the battery in and the battery out, and plugged into the wall. I hooked it up to a monitor and nothing happened, that's the first thing I did when the screen stayed black. When you turn it on you can hear a fan turn on and that's about it. No beeps or anything so I'm guessing it's not making the bios check. The screen gets no back light at all it just stays a black blank screen.

The computer has been having major problems lately with freezing up randomly. I've formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP. I ran some virus programs which found a couple of trojans but got rid of them. The freezing still occurred.

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It does sound like the mobo is bad. Although, there is a very small percentage of laptops that won't even post if the HDD is bad. Try booting up with no HDD in at all. If you can get into the bios then problem solved; else it's time to get a new computer.

Try removing the ram sticks and booting.

Xian Xi said:

Try removing the ram sticks and booting.

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I was thinking that could be it, but if his laptop had bad ram the mobo would give a beep code, most likely. Although there is a chance the mobo speaker is toast too.

systmdfect said:

I was thinking that could be it, but if his laptop had bad ram the mobo would give a beep code, most likely. Although there is a chance the mobo speaker is toast too.

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That would be a whole shitload of things going wrong, all at once, especially mid-way through a OS installation.

Your best, and really only surefire way to fix this (if its not hardware related) is to pull the hdd, install it in a desktop, and verify that is is functioning.

If it checks out 100%, reformat it, pop it back into the laptop, and boot from cd

Before that...when turning the computer on, hold f8 and see if you can get the windows boot menu to come up. Perhaps the entire contents of the OS is still there, and your computer just cant find it due to the 1/2 new OS install that went wrong

If the hard drive is toast, replace it

I took the hard drive out and still nothing, then I took the ram out too and nothing again. So I'm guessing there is something wrong with the motherboard or something. I'm done fooling with it now anyways. Thanks for all the help everyone.