A31 Help with my corrupted screen.

[jimsmith]

I bought a used thinkpad a31 three days ago. Everything had been running fine, until today, when I noticed some lines running down the screen while i was working. I ignored it, and powered off when I was finished.

But now when I try to power on, the screen is VERY CORRUPTED. So much so that I can't make out anything on the screen, and am unable to tell how far the system boots.

As it stands now, I turn it on, corrupted display appears, and changes to different looking corrupted screens. I can hear fans, and the hd working.
It kinda sounds like it boots to windows, then reboots again, and again..... but I can't really tell since I can't see the screen.

Using external monitor I get the same corruption.

Any ideas?

[christopher_wolf]

Welcome to the Thinkpad Forums

Can you get any signal to an external monitor via VGA? You should then be able to see at what stage the system is at during the booting process. You coud try a driver re-install then, but this also has the symptoms of a hardware problem, particularly with the planar.

[jimsmith]

Using external monitor I get the same corruption.

no... i don't know what to do, since i can't get any cues from the screen.

[christopher_wolf]

Oh, I didn't catch that in the first post. Sorry about that.

The only thing I can think of is that it is a hardware problem that has to do with the GPU. You could try booting from a LiveCD or swapping the HDDs with a system that works, but I think you will get the same corrupted screen. Now you could also try flexing the case as well, far fetched as I haven't heard GPU/structural failures plague the A Series, to see if that is the problem. It really doesn't have any of the hallmarks of a software problem at all since it manifests itself at boot, especially since the VGA output doesn't work at all.

[jimsmith]

I'm thinking about crackin 'er open, and tooling around. I know my way around the insides of a pc....
Is it easy to screw things up?

Don't have a LiveCD (don't know what it is), and the laptop didn't come with a recovery disk....

I've been careful not to shake, thats why i don't think its a loose wire....

Could the fact that when its on, it seems to reboot every 30 secs indicate something? Like i said, it's hard to tell what its doing w/o a screen.

[jimsmith]

update:
about 20 restarts later, suddenly the screen only has a few lines running down it and i can see.
I change resolution to 800x.... from 1024x.... and display is fine.

Does this mean anything, or am i still sending it back?
thanks.

[BillMorrow]

what i think that means is that there is a loose plug/socket assembly in the top/display area..
if the lines run top to bottom and come and go when you press (gently) around the edge or open and close the lid..

if this happens when you open, move and close the lid then it might be the lcd cable..

before you crack it open get the hardware maintenance manual..

look for a link in the read me section..