Old laptop, weird lack of display

MichaelM · 19 Apr 2012 at 00:33

My 6 year old Sony Vaio that has been chugging along as a media and general purpose PC, now seems to be failing.

The other day it was starting up and then after the windows loading screen and before the password screen it had a BSOD. Sometimes it would just hang and not BSOD so I put in my password and then the HDD activity light would flicker followed by a BSOD.

So today I took the HDD out and put it into a netbook to see if I could get files from it before doing a format and reinstall. It would instantly BSOD after the windows loading screen while in the netbook so I then put the HDD into my PC as a slave and then retrieved the files and formatted the drive.
After this put it back in the old laptop and started to do a fresh install. It copied the files from the CD and restarted to do the installation. After the windows loading screen came up the screen went blank and it has not come back. I suspect the setup screen is waiting for input but I cannot see it. The monitor is brighter than as if the power was off so that is unlikely the issue.

The GPU is a Nvidia 7400 Go.

I will attempt to attach a monitor to the VGA output tomorrow but it would be nice to get some opinions to help narrow down the issue. I think the BSOD was caused by a messy HDD which I was planning on doing a fresh install on anyway.

Sasahara · 19 Apr 2012 at 12:09

Easiest way to check if it's the HDD or the laptop.

Format the HDD on you're PC as you did before.

Then disconnect all you other Hard drives from your PC and do a fresh install for your PC on the laptop HDD. If you get the same problems you know the drive is junk.

This would also be ok to do on your netbook.

When installing windows 7 don't put in your product key and you'll just have a 31 day demo copy for testing.

What vaio is it btw?

Genoma · 19 Apr 2012 at 12:20

Sounds like a driver not loaded to me, is there an option to boot into safe mode at this point?

MichaelM · 19 Apr 2012 at 12:49

@Genoma
I was not able to get into safe mode for some reason when it was in the laptop but I did try to get into it when the HDD was in the netbook and it just BSOD as usual.

@Sasahara
I also tried to boot using a bootable CD with Knoppix on it. It did the same by displaying the loading screen for Knoppix but then failed to display anything further. Which should have a similar effect to what you where suggesting.

It would seem that as soon as any 2D rendering load is applied the display will just go blank (not switch off). There has never been any signs of visual corruption and I did renew the heatsink (I think it was CPU and northbridge or GPU combined) with AS5 about 2 years ago without any issue and resulting in lower temperatures.

The laptop is a VGN-FE28B with upgraded ram and HDD back in 2009.