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Laptop Screen is Black - Solved

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SandyG:
I have a friend's computer, an old Dell laptop.  I want to say it is close to 10 years old, but I am not sure.  The screen is black.  When it first boots you see the Dell Splash screen for about 1 second and then nothing but black.  To troubleshoot I plugged a monitor into the laptop.  Nothing came up on the monitor.  That monitor was black also.  So I am thinking that it is not the monitor on the laptop but possibly the hard drive that is bad.  I'm thinking if the monitor on the laptop was bad, it would have booted up on the monitor I attached to the laptop.  Any thoughts???

Boggin:
If will boot up into Safe Mode with Networking, that would suggest the graphics but with a machine that old, it could be hardware or software.

If it does boot up into Safe Mode then go to the Dell Support site to see if they still have drivers for it or run the diagnostics http://www.dell.com/support/contents/us/en/19/category/Contact-Information/Technical-Support

SandyG:
I have no idea if it is booting up or not.  The screen is black.  I see nothing.  The computer is on, the lights are on, but no way of telling if it is the monitor for sure or the hard drive.  I can't run any diagnostics or do anything as I can't see anything on the screen.

Shane:
If the screen was bad then you wouldnt have seen the dell logo, also if you can get into the bios you know the screen is fine since it is showing that.

A lot of time the black screen only can be a sign of a bad hard drive or something screwed up with the MBR on the drive, or even if they have another usb drive hooked in the system could simply be trying to boot off of the wrong drive.

You can download Ubuntu and run it off a cd or USB drive and run the OS right off of it without installing it, then you can have some more control over checking the drive and possibly getting the files off as a backup as well.

Shane

SandyG:
Shane, Ubunktu says it's free but when I click on download it wants $2.  I can't find a free download.  Not to mention, how can I run it if the screen on the laptop is blank?  I can't see anything to run anything.  Do you know where I could purchase a hard drive that would be refundable if it wasn't the hard drive?  I'm not even sure what kind of hard drive it would take.  I found out it is a Dell Inspiron 1521 tat is 7 years old.

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