Something is causing both screwy display & win7 boot problem

[starlancerii]

Its a long and twisted story, but something seems to be screwy, and looking through the forums, I don't see anything remotely similar to this happening to anybody else. Does anybody have any guesses on what's going on?

This is for a T61 that I've had for a little over 2 years:
Intel Core Core 2 duo 2GHz T7300
3GB RAM
15.4" WSXGA+ display
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics.
I previously had a windows 7 release candidate installed.

So a couple of days ago, I was just watching a video on my laptop before going to bed. I'm watching it in fullscreen mode, sitting back and not even touching the computer, when suddenly my entire display goes black - but the sound is still on. I think, "huh, this is odd", try ctrl+alt+del, nothing happens, and I just do a hard boot. It doesn't quite work so well, I get something like this:



So, something is odd with the screen - the backlight is on, but all I see are these bars / lines - though they change color slightly as I imagine the boot process continues.

I open up the laptop, check all the connections, and everything looks fine. I disconnect the display bus and reconnect it. No dice, everything looks normal. So I find myself an external monitor (a CRT from 2002!), plug it in, and lo and behold, it seems to work - except that windows 7 never quite reaches the login screen - after the loading screen, I just get a blank screen.

I try the usual methods - load last working configuration, load in 800 x 600, etc, but only safe mode seems to work. In safe mode, I tell it to run a chkdsk /r, and that runs overnight, and ends up telling me that I have a unfixable error - something about a corrupted system.

At this point I just think that I've got awful luck of having my LCD die and my system get corrupted at the same time, but I shrug, load safe mode back up, and backup some files before nuking my system partition and reinstalling windows 7 retail. That loads up fine on my external display, so I think great, I'll just use this external until I can replace my laptop screen.

Now this is the weird part. After getting some of my apps installed again, I try to play a game - heroes of newerth. It errors out - D3D_Create: CreateDevice() failed. So I figure that hey, I have to update drivers. I load up windows update, install the standard patches, and then also install the latest Nvidia Quadro NVS 140m drivers, as well as power management and sound.

I restart. And whoa, what? My laptop screen is working again! I have no idea how, no idea why its even on (after I plugged in the VGA connection to the external monitor, the T61 monitor seems to have just remained off). So I think well, ok - not sure how that happened, but hey, I'm glad its working.

Half an hour later, I try to play that same game again, and it loads up without any errors, but 30 seconds in, it just freezes. And then the screen goes back to bars & lines. I get the SAME issue (bars & lines) after rebooting!

I think, well, ok, I'll just reconnect the external display and use that. But no! Windows 7 refuses to boot to the login screen again! It gets stuck and just blank screens again! But luckily this time I can use my Win 7 disk to do a repair, and that seems to fix the problem.

So now I'm trying to understand - what went wrong?
1) Since this happened not one but twice, I think that somehow the display getting @#$%ed up and windows 7 not booting to the login screen are somehow related.
2) The two times my screen screwed up were when I was doing something full screen - either watching a video or playing a game

What could *possibly* cause this?

TL;DR: while watching a video fullscreen, my display dies and windows 7 stops booting correctly. After doing a reformat and reinstall, it happens AGAIN after I update my drivers and try playing a fullscreen game.

[Harryc]

My guess is that excessive heat cooked the GPU on your systemboard. Try running the PC-Doctor video tests as long as you have an external display to see whats going on.

[starlancerii]

I will try the thinkvantage toolbox diagnostics, but I'm a little doubtful - I've got a laptop cooler under my system, so heat hasn't been an issue historically. Plus I've tried turning on my system over the course of several days, it doesn't make sense that it took several days and a update to my drivers to cool down the GPU enough to work (temporarily).

When you mean cooked the GPU, are you implying permanent or temporary damage?

[Harryc]

There is no such thing as temporary GPU damage.

[starlancerii]

Ah, that'd be a problem. Though if it was indeed GPU damage, why would my display suddenly work again (albeit temporarily)?

[bhtooefr]

Intermittent contact. Things heating and cooling.

Time to replace the motherboard, the nVidia chips are very problematic. Your options are:

Downgrade to T60 or T60p 15.4" WS motherboard, Socket M CPU, and heatsink (edited to correct myself, it's Socket M on the T60, not P.)
Downgrade to T61 integrated graphics 15.4" WS motherboard and possibly heatsink
Replace with another T61 140M 15.4" WS motherboard, and get either the version of the chip that you have, that becomes internally unbonded from the package (can't even repair it by reflowing the board,) or the new version that instead rips itself in half from the thermal stresses
Replace with a T61p 570M 15.4" WS motherboard, and have a faster GPU, but the same problem

[starlancerii]

So continuing from this:

Half an hour later, I try to play that same game again, and it loads up without any errors, but 30 seconds in, it just freezes. And then the screen goes back to bars & lines. I get the SAME issue (bars & lines) after rebooting!

I think, well, ok, I'll just reconnect the external display and use that. But no! Windows 7 refuses to boot to the login screen again! It gets stuck and just blank screens again! But luckily this time I can use my Win 7 disk to do a repair, and that seems to fix the problem.

Here's an update:
When I said it fixes the problem, I mean that I can boot up using my external monitor, that works fine - T61 monitor still doesn't work. I played around a bit, installing more updates.

If I reinstall the "nvidia quadro NVS 140M" driver (it was rolled back with the repair), once again my laptop display works.

I took HarryC's suggestion and got Lenovo ThinkVantage toolbox, and ran that. The full system test indicates that there's nothing wrong, I'll try running a stress test next.


bhtooefr, are you sure that's the case? I mean, if this thing were working off and on with no explainable similarities in what causes the problems, I'd call it a motherboard issue. But given that
1) something seems to get corrupted to prevent win7 from booting, and this can be fixed with a repair
2) my lcd seems to work only after I update the drivers

I'm not sure how that's due to things heating and cooling.

[Harryc]

When you power on the laptop, the first thing you should see is the IBM or Lenovo Logo'd boot screen. That screen is BIOS generated and has nothing to do with the OS. If at any time you do not see that screen normally (minus the vertical lines) you have a hardware issue.

[starlancerii]

Yeah, that's why I initially thought that this was a problem with either my LCD.

Somehow, SOMEHOW, after I install the drivers for my Nvidia card, the IBM Logo screen works fine. Before I install those drivers, it does not, and install I see the bars and lines. This really puzzles me greatly.

[Harryc]

If you remove the hard drive, you should still see the boot screen. Any perceived relationship between the LCD working and drivers at that point in the boot process is purely coincidental.

[bhtooefr]

The video chip is always in a VESA mode at that point, not any nVidia-specific modes. The chip is hosed, this is a VERY common problem, get a new mobo, end of story.