R51 Screen Problems & Recovery Help

[umbertosuave]

Hi. Brand new here. Seems like lots of knowledge floating around.

So here is my situation. I was given a R51 1836-BBU the other day that has some issues. I was told by the owner that the display does not work and it was due to his attempt to update his ATI drivers in which he somehow disabled his vga controller? He said the machine had also blue screened on him. The machine had also been sent if for repairs before.

Upon plugging it in and booting up I confirmed No display. I do know that it boots. The XP startup sound and shutdown sound are heard.
When it was hooked up to an external monitor, I only get the Bios screen followed by the XP load screen. and bam! the lights go out.

Where I am at. I managed to run a repair on XP that had several errors. The desktop does now display on the external monitor.

I would like to know how to turn on the attached LCD and what my options for are as rolling back the sysem to factory specs.
I have no recovery CDs and zero experience with Thinkpads.
I did however notice what I believe to be the hidden partition while running the XP disc at startup.

[mitchellst]

To return the system to factory specs, press F11 while the IBM screen is showing. This should load you into rescue and recovery. There will be options to recover your system from there.

Assuming that the screen is actually failing because of some software related problem, this should fix it. It sounds like it could just as easily be hardware related though.

[umbertosuave]

F11 pulls a boot to device menu. Which option would be the recovery partition?
How do I go about determining if the LCD failure is software or hardware related?

[ryengineer]

F11 pulls a boot to device menu. Which option would be the recovery partition?
How do I go about determining if the LCD failure is software or hardware related?

You'll need Rescue and Recovery - Recovery repair diskette.

Once repaired, run PC Doctor, results of Video devices are what you should be looking at.

The following manual will help you in taking things apart and looking at lcd cables etc. :

Thinkpad R51 - Hardware Maintenance Manual.

[umbertosuave]

Hmm... No floppy drive. Do I have any other options to restore the rescue and recovery?
Is the partition <EISA Utlilties> I saw the actual hidden partition?

I'll follow up with what I find out from the maintenance manual.
Also, I just noticed I can see the desktop on the attached LCD, but just barely, the screen is still pretty much all black. Could this be an indicator of something anyone has seen before?