My Laptop won't display anything wont even show BIOS

[chishio8]

My laptop wont display anything. The screen itself does not even power on but everything else powers on. has 4 gb of ram but they still work. My laptop has no hard drive. Would that be the culprit?

[grandpa_simpson]

My laptop has no hard drive. Would that be the culprit?

Even if the rest of Your computer is working there is no chance that it will boot into an operating system if no hard drive is installed.  In most cases the operating system is on the hard drive.


Since we don't know if some of the major components of the laptop are even working, before getting a new hard drive for the laptop you should ensure that the laptop hard ware is working.  Get yourself a Live Linux CD (Knoppix 5.1 will do), boot off the CD and see what happens.  If you get nothing at first, which I expect will happen, remove one of the ram modules from the laptop and trying booting again off the CD.  If that doesn't work, remove the ram and try the other one.  If that doesn't work, attatch and external montior to the laptop to see if you get anything out of it.  Use the Fn + ? key on your laptop to toggle the screen over to the external monitor after powering on the laptop.  If you still get nothing, it could be due to failed onboard video or the inverter/backlight in the display...  You'd be looking at the motherboard replacement..  If it does work then you've isolated the problem to the laptop display hardware, either the invertor or backlight.  Kind of difficult to tell if the inverter or backlight is the problem without the right tools...  You may be able to find a used laptop of similar make and model and salavge the display from it, and swap it with your current bad one if needed. 

Might want to check the DC output voltage of the power supply just to be sure enough power is getting to the laptop.  Look on the power brick for the DC output voltage..

[rthompson80819]

Why does your laptop not have a hard drive?  Did somebody take it out?  Do you have a solid state drive?

All computers had a hard drive (or solid state drives) at birth ,or initial turn on.

[chishio8]

External Monitors dont work either. the hardware is good. i checked the memory and dvd drive. everything lights up just nothing is displayed

[grandpa_simpson]

If an external monitor doesn't work then the problem is not with your laptop display, assuming that you correctly toggled the laptop display to the external monitor.  The most likely is that the onboard video has failed.  Regardless, you're not looking at an easy fix at this point.  Even if you could find a used laptop of similar make/model and get the mboard out of it, it's a big job..  On the other hand, you could find a used model, and take the display off of your current laptop and move it over to the laptop with the presumed good motherboard, move the hard drive over and ram as well...