Black screen after bios screen

[TVR-190]

My sisters Toshiba laptop is playing up, no hardware changes or anything had been done, she just booted it up, we get the boot window with the press F12 And F2 to enter menus text etc, then it loads bios and screen goes black. the screen is on and working but it is just black. i have tried doing a fresh install with xp disk, black screen, new hd, black screen.

any ideas

[Ozzie]

Flip it upside down and unscrew the Ram compartment.
Make sure the ram has'nt popped out and if necessary give the Ram contacts a clean.

[pow3rslave]

when you say you did an install, did that all go sweet or did it too freeze on a black screen before the isntall started?
as ozzie said i'd check the internal hardware, ide ribbon/sata connection to hdd. also is there a card reader, could be it's boot menu in the bios is a bit whacked and the boot order is looking for a cd/sd card or something. double check the bios and it's boot order.

[TVR-190]

ram is all good

[Ozzie]

Are you able to enter the bios?

Check the boot device hasnt changed to an external device (usb ect..)

But by those symptoms it sounds like a hardware issue to me.

[TVR-190]

i didnt do an install, if i try i get a black screen, cant enter bios or set boot order cause i get a black screen.

[HaMmErD]

does it do any beeps from the pc speaker? could be gfx card failure

oops you saidyou can see the first initial bootup... so its not gfx.. my bad :S

[pow3rslave]

i didnt do an install, if i try i get a black screen, cant enter bios or set boot order cause i get a black screen.

isn't that what the f1/f12 prompts that come up first thing are?

[holdensupporter2005]

Are you able to boot from a Windows CD?
I had a laptop today that was doing the same thing, it would boot to the bios and then would shutdown and restart as soon as it tried to boot from the HDD. I was able to boot from a windows cd. Turns out that the laptop had gone into Hibernation mode and had damaged the NTLDR file. Replaced this file with one from the Windows CD and it booted fine.

Yours may be a similar problem.

[TVR-190]

na like i said it wont boot from cd and if press the key to enter bios i get the same black screen

[hingo1983]

Might be a long shot here but with laptops there is a function where you can set the output of the VGA port. This can usually be set in three ways:

1) Laptop LCD Monitor + external VGA Display
2) Laptop LCD Monitor - external VGA Display
3) No Laptop LCD monitor display + external VGA display

To cycle through these settings, its usually a matter of holding down the Fn key and pressing the appropriate function key. In my experiences, this key is mostly the F7 key but it depends on brand and model.

If it seems to boot to windows but has no display, then this may be your problem. If not, then try to boot it from CD and run a memory test or HDD test.

[alien]

So do you see the POST screen? Or do you only see the manafacaturers logo?

If you dont see the POST screen then there is something seriously wrong. Same as actually getting into the BIOS. But if you can see the POST screen then you should be able to see the BIOS screen. The POST and BIOS screens on laptops are designed to work whatever the display setting is (like kingo1983 said). If the BIOS is screwed there is not much to do except claim it under warranty if it is. If the BIOS fails then it's usually not work fixing because the BIOS is a chip sitting on the motherboard!

[Bob12345]

Sounds like you have a bad mobo.

[PaRaDoX]

could be faulty memory new versions of windows wont tell you if its bluescreened, it will just hang. get a bootable cd (bart PE or something) and run a memcheck

make sure the boot order is correct too