Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
7 Posts
0
8082
Screen goes dark shortly after boot-up
My system (XP) boots up normally and displays the desktop. A few seconds later, the screen loses its signal, the system stays up, but can't be used. I had wiped the drive and restored the system to a date prior to the first occurrence of this problem. Things worked ok last nite and I shut the system down. Today's it's back!
Video card problem? Virus?
TIA for any thoughts.
DELL-Saul H
18 Posts
0
January 30th, 2014 09:00
Good day Eddiec70,
Have you tried to run the diags (F12), lets see if we can see the test running. If we don't see anything on the lcd, do you happen to have another cable to test with? Also do you happen to have a known good HDD to swap out and test. The HDD could be going bad if the firmware on it bad. Let me know what else I can do at this time.
-saul - #Iwork4Dell
eddiec70
7 Posts
0
January 30th, 2014 16:00
Good day, Saul:
A different cable made no difference. When booted by a boot-disk, and not in Windows XP, the monitor stays on indefinitely.
I'm unclear as to what you mean about diagnostics with F12, and "the test running."
I don't have a spare HDD and don't know if buying one just for a test makes sense.
How would the firmware on a 2-year-old HDD be bad?
The blue screen of death has now appeared.
Main question: odds of a bad HDD vs an XP issue? (If the latter, I will wipe the disk and restore to an earlier version)
Sorry, don't (and won't) have a Twitter account.
Thanks for the reply.
forix
27 Posts
0
January 31st, 2014 07:00
It sounds like XP issue, it could be some problem with video driver.
Download the lastest video drivers, boot the system in administrative mode and try to install the downloaded video drivers.
eddiec70
7 Posts
0
January 31st, 2014 07:00
Interestingly, I'm in the 18-hour process of wiping and restoring the hard drive, and neither the drive or the screen are having any problems.
I'll try the video driver update, but I don't know what you mean by booting in "administrative mode." A techie I'm not.
Thanks for the reply!
forix
27 Posts
0
January 31st, 2014 08:00
Sorry, it's called safe mode, not administrative mode /in safe mode you are logged in the system as administrator/.
You should press F8 just before booting. Then you should have something like normal boot, safe boot or something like this.
When you boot in safe mode, widows do not load the drivers, so you will be able to understand whether it's a driver problem.
If the system boots, just try to uninstall installed video drivers, restart the system, safe mode again and try to install the lastest drivers