T530 screen goes black after trying to load OS

[wrybread]

I'm helping a friend with his T530, and it has a strange problem where the screen goes black as soon as it starts to load the OS.

- this happens when loading an OS from a thumbdrive or DVD (as well as a harddrive)

- it passes all "Lenovo Diagnostics" and displays them fine

- I tried resetting bios to default, then put UEFI back to "both, legacy first" (and tried all UEFI modes)

- and weirdly it doesn't show the harddrive activity light for very long. As soon as the screen goes black the HD activity light stops blinking. Otherwise I'd be certain it's a GPU issue.

- also weirdly I can't boot from a thumbdrive. When I try to boot from a Windows installer thumbdrive (that's confirmed working on another computer) I select it, and then the screen goes black. After a few seconds I get some dots on the screen and then it goes black again.

- no improvement when using an external monitor.

I don't imagine anyone has any ideas?


-

[kfzhu1229]

If yours have discrete nvidia optimus graphics, try switching the graphics mode in BIOS between optimus, discrete only and integrated only options. This fault reminds me of what happens when GPU Vcore capacitors are dying on my old Dell laptop, that the graphics would work for a little while, and then suddenly screen go black as the capacitors no longer keep up.

[wrybread]

Unfortunately only the one video card in this laptop.

[RealBlackStuff]

Try another HDD/SSD.