Inspiron 6400 won't display anything after Dell logo

[mitchnozka1]

Hi all,

I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. It shows the Dell logo when starting, but then the screen goes blank afterward. If left to boot, I can hear the Windows XP startup sound, but I'm not able to view anything.

Cannot boot off of CD, nor will it allow me to go into BIOS when booting.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: Was able to get into BIOS to do a hardware scan. Was able to get into Windows before screen went black again. Now, I can get into BIOS usually for a few to several seconds before it blacks out. This is really odd. Any ideas?

Thank you,

Mitch

 

[mpilchfamily]

Try a differnt monitor.

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

can you stably enter the bios if you remove the harddrive? if you can, remove the harddrive and boot from a livecd; like ubuntu or something.
If it happens then... it could be a power problem- maybe try booting without the battery inserted, on AC power, or see if you can selectively boot directly to hdd (F12, I think?), or run the diagnostics through see if there is a hardware failure.
If it doesn't happen... try putting the harddrive back in, removing the livecd, and applying some pressure above and below where the harddrive is encased to dampen vibrations a bit- boot it. It could possibly be a connection to the lcd inverter is loose, and the harddrive spinning up causes it to lose contact.

I have the same laptop myself (e1505, w/ core duo yonah cpu), so I know the unthinkable random crap that can solve the problems. Here's what I suggest along that route:
try booting to the mediadirect service, properly shutting down the system form within that, and then cold booting to XP
you said you can hear the xp startup. get yourself to the desktop (by assuming everything like the password logon prompt, etc is going as typical and you just can't see) and let things load- then press Fn+F8, and once again- this'll toggle the primary display adapter to the laptop screen and an external one- doing it one-three times should get things aligned so the monitor works again.

uncomplicate things by working with just the laptop while troubleshooting- don't plug it into a dock, no flash drives, keyboards, mice, external monitors, optical disks in the bay, etc. And do yourself a favor- surf forums online before committing to calling dell. And when you do- call ~ 12pm EST and no later than 1pm EST