W500 LCD broken after trouble with FGLRX driver install

[Zak]

I had a rather troublesome experience installing FGLRX on a fresh Debian installation. One thing I tried was FGLRX from AMD's website with the install script, followed by creating a configuration file with aticonfig --initial. When I started X, the screen flickered a few times and displayed the mouse pointer in several places at once, among other visual errors. I tried switching to a virtual terminal, the the screen went blank. It did come back on when I switched back to X, but went blank following a reboot and stayed that way, even in the BIOS setup. Fn-F7 had no effect other than to make the external screen blink briefly. I eventually got FGLRX working with an external monitor attached, but the OS doesn't even see that the LCD is attached.

I took the screen out of the lid to check to see if the old Z61m screen I have could connect to the same cable. The connector is obviously different, so I reassembled the lid and tried again. Same result. I then switched to integrated graphics in the BIOS. On reboot, the internal LCD did come on, but it displayed nothing but white. The bootloader and OS behaved as if it was working, but no image other than the white ever appeared. Fn-F7 did switch to the external display under these conditions. I'm concerned that I actually have two problems:

1. That FGLRX did something bad to the GPU's firmware
2. That I did something bad to the cable or LCD

I'm looking for additional troubleshooting steps and possible fixes now. Any suggestions?

[awolfe63]

The driver does not change the GPU firmware - so I would bet on #2.

[Zak]

It should not change the firmware or it can not change the firmware?

The screen went out at exactly the same time the bad driver was displaying incorrect images on the screen, so if it's some unrelated problem, it's a hell of a coincidence.

[awolfe63]

Well - somebody could write a driver that changed the firmware, but the existing ones don't do that and it won't happen from a bug.

My guess is that the coincidence is that you had a hardware failure at the same time as the driver change. It happens.

[Zak]

In that case, what's the most likely hardware failure for this set of symptoms?

• Under discrete graphics, the LCD is black, backlight off, not detected by the OS, BIOS uses external even though it's set to use the internal
• Under integrated graphics, the LCD is white, blacklight on, detected by the OS, BIOS does not use the external screen unless I press Fn-F7

[awolfe63]

I don't have a clue. If I had to guess - loose LCD cable. But it could be a failed GPU - most likely the Intel GPU.

Almost impossible to diagnose without swapping out parts.

[Zak]

The cable is not lose; I started the machine up partly disassembled and ensured both ends of the cable were snug.