Vista Business Problem Z61m 9450-a36

[jvthink]

Laptop starts up to login screen and all is well. After logging in system goes through normal wait time, HDD seems fine. A pink/red hue screen appears with normal mouse cursor and nothing else. I can move the cursor. Booted in safe mode and it comes up fine to blank, black safe mode screen. Chose F8 and tried some various boot options to no avail. Noticed you can hit Fn F5 to manage wireless (which wireless is working fine) and menu pops up fine over the top of the pink background. So I hit Fn F7 and attached an external monitor and it displays the same pink screen. Aha could be the video driver.

Started Thinkvantage rescue recovery and was able to get on the Internet with the Opera browser using a wired Ethernet connection. So the video card seems to be fine as does the monitor but since Vista has not started in rescue recovery not sure this is telling me much. Wondering if I can apply patches to drivers without actually being in Vista?

I put the Vista DVD in the drive and booted up to the Vista recovery options. The start-up recovery yielded no results but I can get to a C prompt. This seems to be a Vista issue but I am not sure how to update Vista without actually starting Vista. Anyway... getting to wits end and would appreciate any ideas / moral support.

I am a big Thinkpad fan and just bought a new T Series. This Z has been great until this happened. Nothing eventful in terms of new hardware, drivers, etc. My daughter had released IP to login to a relatives wireless router and when she rebooted this started. It seems Vista could have been corrupted somehow. Hate to blow away Vista but getting deseperate!

[Neil]

I'm not sure this will help at all, but something you could try is to boot in Safe Mode and remove the graphics adapter drive from device manager. When you re-boot normally, it will either re-install the drivers or boot with the standard graphics adapter. Either way, should be different that what you are getting now.

In fact you may want to try just the standard driver as a test. I've had a couple of ThinkPads in the past, and still have one of them, that will not display at all with the correct driver for the graphics card, but will work fine with only the Windows standard driver. I'm sure my machines have defective ATI graphics chips, and yours could have a similar hardware problem, although it's very rare with the Intel chip.

[jvthink]

Thanks for advice. I cannot get into safe mode but would like any ideas on how to get safe mode to work properly. Is there anyway to disable the driver or use the standard driver without logging into Vista? When I try to go into safe mode it only brings up a blank black screen with safe mode on all four corners.

[RealBlackStuff]

Try pressing F8 a number of times at bootup, till you see the boot menu.
Select Enable VGA mode, see if that lets you in.
A reddish/pinkish screen normally points to a dying backlight/CCFL, but you say this also shows on an external monitor? Curious...

[jvthink]

Tried that to to no avail. Just get a low resolution mouse on top of a pink screen! Also tried connecting external monitor and got same result so it isn't the display but could be the driver or video card/chip. I am actually on the computer typing this message from inside Thinkvantage on Opera and display is fine so i don't think it is the video card but who knows. Vista appears to run fine watching the HDD whirl but no display. I can get to the command prompt from Thinkvantage so going to try chkdsk and sfc options. Appreciate an advice. machine is in lala land right now...

[jvthink]

Would appreciate it if anyone could read through the post thus far and suggest any other ideas. Would like to know how to run SFC from the command prompt i can get in thinkvantage rescue. Getting a windows resource error message. ChkDsk ran with no errors. I have a vista windows anytime upgrade dvd that came with the laptop and it will boot to the dvd but it says no backups or restore points exist and the start-up recovery doesn't do anything.

[RealBlackStuff]

From a command line: sfc /scannow
It may ask for your Windows CD/DVD.
It will restore missing main files. To be honest, it never worked for me...

I would try a Live Linux CD (free ISO downloads all over the www), and see if your laptop boots correctly from that.
If the LCD still shows pink, then you have a major hardware problem.

If you have it, try installing XP or W7 instead (use software for the T60/R60 series!)