[SOLVED] Screen Change CMOS BIOS

[Daveydln]

Hello everyone.

I have a confusing one here and I was wondering if anyone could help me.

A few weeks ago I stepped on my laptop damaging the screen. Laptop is a Terra 1513A (it's German).

I ordered a new screen, replaced it, and for a week or so my laptop worked fine.

Then I started getting just a black screen on start-up (back-light coming on only). I plugged the laptop into an external monitor and Windows was running fine on the monitor.

So I figured maybe the interface cable had been damaged whilst I changed the screen, or re-sat poorly and damaged over the week with opening and closing the lid... so I changed this out but still the same.

So I figured maybe there was a hardware issue that could be resolved in BIOS, but I couldn't get BIOS to run on an external monitor (tried everything). Then I figured I would just remove the CMOS battery to reset BIOS. Things now got worse...

The laptop reboots, fans run, seems like it's on... but it won't work on an external monitor now at all... I figured it might be booting into BIOS directly after the reset but there's no way to tell because the laptop screen doesn't work and BIOS won't run on an external monitor...

It seemed to me that the new screen was the culprit either way.

Then I suddenly remembered my wife had the exact same laptop which she got rid of after breaking her screen years ago... so I fished it out if storage and put the new screen in place and voila, it worked! Which means the new screen worked all along... so what caused the black screen on my laptop? It must be display related because it worked fine plugged into an external monitor...

Also, I now have two identical laptops. One with all my stuff on but no working screen, one with a working screen but my wife's old stuff... would switching the hard drives be all that is required to get mine up and running again?

Sorry for the long post! Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

[kerberos_20]

well yes, simple drive swap on same laptops will work, you just have to update you windows licence as hardware id will be differrent, but that shouldnt be an issue since those laptops got win keys stored inside mainboard firmware..so it should work in automatic way

 

[Daveydln]

Okay, thanks for the info. My wife has suddenly decided now her laptop is working again after all these years that she wants to check it for anything she wants to keep! So I'll have to wait to try and switch the hard drive!

If anyone has any ideas on what might have happened to my original laptop I'd be very interested in knowing in the meantime!