Okay, here's the deal. About a month ago my screen cracked and the warranty is up. I had a spare CRT laying around so I just plugged it into that and it worked just fine as a substitute. However, today I had to reformat for various reasons and I did so using a friend's similar model laptop by putting my hard drive in it. After I got windows up and running I put the hard drive back in my machine and took it home.
After trying it out with the external monitor I've come to the conclusion that the standard vga driver does not support multiple monitors and therefore not my external (since the laptop still believes that the LCD is plugged in and functional even without any of the LCD wires plugged into the motherboard).
As it is the external blinks on during POST like should when the VGA port is tested. I'm sure I could solve this problem by disabling the LCD monitor in BIOS but since I can't see anything that is not possible.
It seems the only solutions left to me are:
1. Buying a new LCD
2. Buying/finding a new laptop
3. Some crazy hardware magic to disable the default LCD and let the external display during POST so I can get to BIOS and/or Windows Safe Mode
Any thoughts?
After trying it out with the external monitor I've come to the conclusion that the standard vga driver does not support multiple monitors and therefore not my external (since the laptop still believes that the LCD is plugged in and functional even without any of the LCD wires plugged into the motherboard).
As it is the external blinks on during POST like should when the VGA port is tested. I'm sure I could solve this problem by disabling the LCD monitor in BIOS but since I can't see anything that is not possible.
It seems the only solutions left to me are:
1. Buying a new LCD
2. Buying/finding a new laptop
3. Some crazy hardware magic to disable the default LCD and let the external display during POST so I can get to BIOS and/or Windows Safe Mode
Any thoughts?
