I have a HP Pavilion dv5000 laptop, 1.5 years old (unfortunately out of warranty). One day a few weeks ago, when I turned it on, the screen lit up but nothing showed up on the screen. Fans were running and Windows XP seemed to start properly (I could log in and log out "by touch"). Since then, there were two or three times when the screen would actually work normally when I start up, but most of the time when I tried, the screen would be blank (but the backlight is there).
I tried hooking up an external monitor. It would show the Windows splash screen while Windows was loading, but then the monitor would go blank ("No Signal").
Today I found this forum and read through a bunch of threads on similar problems, so I thought I'd try some of the ideas posted here. Here's a summary of what I've tried:
- Booted in Safe Mode and the external monitor worked. Disabled the display adapter, and now I can get normal Windows mode to show up on the external monitor (but not on the laptop monitor).
- Ran chkdsk /f, but it didn't fix everything. (It kept finding file errors on subsequent runs of chkdsk.)
- Tried Diagnostics under the BIOS screen (again, only on the external monitor). It quit before it's done, claiming "#2 Test failure - 07".
What else should I be checking? And what is probably causing the problem? The LCD on the laptop, the drivers, the hard drive, the motherboard, or what? I could probably live with hooking it up permanently to an external monitor, but is this problem indicative of something more serious (like imminent HD/mobo failure---should I start budgeting for a new laptop?)?
Thanks so much in advance!
