Howdy, Sorry for reviving an old thread, but I had a problem like this and just discovered a fix (for my particular situation) [or so I thought... the fix just went to hell...].
In December of 2005, a few days before the warranty expired, I suddenly had a problem where my LCD appeared to no longer work and I had to hook up an external monitor. I made a note to look at the problem and call HP while I still had time, but it was another week or so before I had a chance. By the time I called them, they informed me I was out of warranty. Furthermore, they said since the problem was the LCD, and since the warranty doesn't cover "cracked displays" (whatever that means) anyway, that it would cost me $400 just for them to look at the problem. Obviously, I was a bit unhappy with HP.... $2500 for a system that lasted a year and another $400 (at least) for them to even look at it... and it wasn't clear to me that the display was "cracked" since it seemed the backlight of the LCD would illuminate as I cycled through the different available outputs when hitting Fn-F4. However, it would never put an image on the screen. I ended up opening it up and disassembling it, but never found anything that looked obviously wrong. Not being completely familiar with LCDs and their control circuits, I gave up on a hardware approach. At some point, while booting the dark side (Windows X POS [piece 'o... ]), I wandered into some diagnostics from HP... either installed on the hard drive or at the web site. Not sure which however because during the course of my testing, I managed to get an image to show on the LCD and having achieved that immediately booted Linux to see if my problem was solved... it wasn't. I tried to find the diagnostic again, but never had much luck, so ended up accepting (for the moment) that my laptop was non-mobile... that is, unless I wanted to haul a separate LCD monitor around with me (which I did on occasion). Note that I had this problem whether I booted Linux or Windows. No matter which I booted, and the number of times I hit Fn-F4, I still got no image... just the turning on/off of the LCD backlight. So... my laptop has been sitting here in my office running Linux happily but for the fact that it needs an external monitor. In a way, it was good because it got me off the couch in the living room, which is where I had done all my work the previous year after purchasing my laptop, back into my home office. Which brings me to today. I decided to boot the dark side to make sure I was up to date with Windows Updates, HP updates, and antiviral goodies. While doing so, I was about to download an update the BIOS in hopes that a good flashing might reset whatever bits might be causing the problem. Before doing so, however, I noticed some diagnostics at HPs site and ran them on my adapter and display. Lo and behold, I had an image on my LCD again!!! With renewed hope, I went in search of trying to figure out how to make it work all the time. My first boots were unsuccessful and each ended in me having to reconnect the monitor to see what was going on. But there was hope... I had seen that it worked (hardware AOK) and was determined to find out what bit of software was screwing things up. Since both times I had seen an image on my LCD was while in Windows, I decided to start my investigation there. During the course of that I discovered that at one point, I had decided to play with the dual monitor display provided by the NVIDIA driver (v6.14.10.4716... not sure if that was Microsoft's or NVIDIA's at this point... still investigating). I set it to single monitor mode and rebooted and Voila!, there was the LCD display on boot and into Linux. Wanting to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I rebooted a few times and powered it down for a bit. On power up I still had Success!!! Or so it seemed... Waiting a bit more and rebooting again and... Shit! No display. So... back into Windows... Sure enough... going back to the display control panel I was back in "multiple monitor" mode again. Switched back to "plug and play monitor" (the only other option) and rebooted. Hmmm.... well... back to the drawing board... BUT AT LEAST I KNOW IT ISN'T HARDWARE... so I'm glad I saved my $400... fat lot of help HP was... they wouldn't even look at it without a deposit. Next time I want an AMD laptop I'll go to Acer. No more time for now, but I'll try to provide an update when I find the magical combination of BIOS/driver/monitor settings to keep the LCD working... something about the diagnostic makes it do something that ends up getting reset. With no help from HP, I'll have to muddle along myself. But at least there's hope for my $2500 paperweight. SiliconSlick On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 12:14 -1000, Ryuhei Yokokawa wrote: > Hello, > Has anyone here experienced a problem where the R3000 stops displaying > stuff on the LCD? I've been using this laptop for just over a year now > so my warranty is gone..... If anyone has any idea on how to fix it, > please tell me. > Thank you! > -Ryuhei > _______________________________________________ > LinuxR3000 mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 > Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/ -- SiliconSlick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
