When I restarted Windows, it showed up some formation on screen like that of a CD (round spiral lines)
I own a Toshiba M35X-S109 since last two years. It was working perfectly fine till yesterday when suddenly the screen started to flicker a little bit. After working for another half an hour, the screen started flickering more frequently and suddenly tuned blank. When I tried to restart it, it didn’t even go to the part where it shows up Toshiba on the screen. The screen just remained blue.
I took off the battery for a while and then I was able to restart it after around 10 minutes. But again after working for around 15 minutes the same thing happened and this time when I restarted Windows, it showed up some formation on screen like that of a CD( round spiral lines) on the left portion.
Kindly advice me what is wrong with my machine and what could be done to fix it.
I would really appreciate a reply from your side.
Not really sure what’s going on with the laptop, but I can suggest some troubleshooting steps. First of all, I would try to connect an external monitor and then start up the laptop. Now press on Fn key and press on F5 to select the video output mode. Make the laptop to display the video on both screens (internal screen and external monitor) at the same time. Now wait until it fails.
If the video fails only on the laptop screen and displays fine on the external monitor, then something is wrong in the display assembly. I would try to reseat the video cable on the system board and on the screen first, it might be just a loose connection. Check this website for laptop and display disassembly instructions. The second suspect would be the video cable. And finally the laptop screen itself.
If the video fails on both screens, then you might have more serious problem – a bad system board.
February 29th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Please help. My Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV660 laptop won’t boot.
When I try to power up, the ac light comes on, but I don’t see anything happen with the hard drive. The screen is completely blank/black. I don’t hear anything happening with the hard drive, nor is the light for the hard drive coming on.
I had someone take a look at it, but he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He said it was not a problem with the hard drive, power, video, or memory. Any ideas?
February 21st, 2008 at 11:08 pm
David Mickelson,
If the old cracked LCD screen still displays image correctly then there is something wrong with the new screen.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:24 pm
I just got a screen off of ebay that is suppose to be good but when I hooked it up the video is in three parts.It starts windows about 1/3 of the way up the screen in the middle of the screen running towards the right and comes in on the left side of the lcd towards the middle joining up where it started in the middle 1/3 of the way up the screen.Now the bottom 1/3 of the screen is where the screen started 1/3 of the way up and coming down to the 1/3 of the screen that is left from the other part starting 1/3 of the way up the screen.So the picture is divided into like three parts.I have never seen this before but is there something I can do to fix this?The lcd numbers where compatable when I bought it for mine so that should not be the problem.The inverter is good because the screen I took off worked good but it was cracked.The backlight is good because the video is good but it is in three sections.What can I do?The guy I bought it from claims it is good.I have double checked all the connections so all I can come up with is a bad lcd.Am I right?Thank You,Dave
January 28th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Hi. I have a JVC laptop and dropped it off the sofa. It now has a color scrambled screen. I tried rebooting many times, but does not help. Any ideas what the problem could be?
January 21st, 2008 at 11:04 am
Hi,
I have a gateway laptop that is giving me an odd problem. When I start the machine I see the splash screen with the gateway logo and then it progresses to the the windows login screen (I have XP Pro) and I enter the pwd and it proceeds. Then the screen goes “dotty” on me. I mean it gets all kinds of wierd patterns on the screen. Sometimes they are dots and dashes, some times they are vertical lines. sometime they are horizontal lines. Sometimes they are stationary lines and sometimes they are moving. This may not be that odd but what makes it weird is that if I have started the machine after a relatively long time of having kept it shutdown, the normal functioning screen remains long enough for me to logon. If I have tried it a few times then the moment I turn the computer on, splash screen with logo and then back to the weird things on the screen.
I also tried to boot in safe mode but got this error.
Media test failure. check cable
Exiting intel boot agent.
If this was the case then why did it boot up earlier? I am lost. Can you point me in the right direction?
Thanks
Fazle”
January 17th, 2008 at 4:58 am
Hi,
I have just bought a medion 2080 notebook second hand, works fine. Ive tried to fit a mini pci wireless card & windows will not boot with it installed, will boot fine without it fitted though, any advice?
The card is 2nd hand but i assume it works ok.
Thanks Jon
December 3rd, 2007 at 10:21 am
have a thinkpad 240x 500 mhz. problem with screen.
the screen is normal for about 1/3 of its length
(from left to right) and has about 2/3 of it totally
white. a monitor hooked up to the external connection works fine, normal screen. is it a bad cable? bad screen? or ? and do all the screens interchange between the 240 series? (240, 240x, 240z)
the ibm web site shows two different cables used, along with two different screen manafacturers, deending on the suffix of the model. but
i wonder if either screen will work if you repace
the whole thing. any help would be most appreciated.
thanks, adrian.
September 12th, 2007 at 8:44 am
I replaced the 20g hard drive in a Sony PCG-F590 Laptop with a 120g drive. Bios did not recognize the new drive and I received the dreaded “Operating System Not Found”. So I reinstalled the original HD but it is not recognized in BIOS now either. Did the voltage requirement of the bigger drive hose my motherboard or is there any hope here?
August 21st, 2007 at 6:47 pm
While running my My Gateway m305, I heard a pop and the screen went blank. Prior to going out completely the screen would go blank if it was adjusted in a certain position. Any ideas on what’s going on or not going on with this?
August 14th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Beth,
Start your laptop with an external screen attached to the VGA port on the laptop. Check if you have the same flickering lines on the external video. If lines appear on both internal and external screen, you have a problem with the video card and will have to replace the motherboard.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
My Toshiba Tecra S1 recently started to have issues with its display. It will start to have lines flicker across the screen and it will freeze. I have taken it apart and have reseated everything and it has stopped for awhile, but it has started up again. Is it the motherboard, video card, something else? A loose connection maybe?
May 13th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
I have a Toshiba M45 and my screen is inverted, I mean like the colors are different. I have tested it on an external monitor and it comes out fine. Also I opened an inverted image on Paint and I Reinverted it with Paint and the image comes out normal, WHAT MIGHT BE GOING ON> I NEED HELP THX. THE WHOLE SCREEN IS INVERTED FROM TURNInG IT ON TO SHUTTING IT DOWN.
March 22nd, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Robert Gancedo,
This site (www.laptoprepair101.com) has examples of bad images on LCD screen. If your laptop looks like example 5 probably you have a bad screen.
March 20th, 2007 at 5:24 am
The screen of my Toshiba TE2000 is a third OK (I can see the screen normal) and the rest is solid white. With a external monitor screen is ok. I reset the cable in both end but still have same problem. Any help on this? Thank you very much,
March 1st, 2007 at 6:42 am
Okay, I installed the new hard drive, same result. I removed the cd drive to be sure it is not interfering, and I still get this:
Intel Boot Agent V 4.1.08
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-MOF: Exiting Intel Boot Agent
Operating system not found
Any ideas now? I still have to try the IDE cable on the old drive to see about recovering data, but now it seems like it is not the drive itself. Thanks again for the help.
February 28th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Robin,
Test the hard drive with Hitachi’s drive fitness test and memory with Memtest86+. You’ll find links to both utilities on the right side in “Useful Links”.
February 27th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
HP laptop..freezes in boot mode. windows xp stays on screen..won’t boot up with windows xp cd. won’t boot up with bart cd. ran all diagnostics seems nothing is wrong. Help. f8 no f9 no f10 no.
February 27th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
nick,
First of all, make sure the USB enclosure itself is good, test it with another hard drive just in case. Replace the enclosure if it’s bad. You can try connecting the drive to a desktop computer via an IDE adapter.
I have a cheap USB enclosure. For some strange reason this enclosure will not work with all laptop hard drives, maybe because it’s a cheap one. Occasionally the hard drive is not detected by Windows when I use this enclosure but the same hard drive works perfectly fine when I use an IDE adapter.
Otherwise you still have a chance to get your data back if you use a clean room recover service – very expensive.
February 27th, 2007 at 7:06 am
My brother gave the laptop, and said he had had a similar problem once on a different type, and replacing the battery fixed it. I put the drive in a portable drive enclosure and hooked it up to a different machine, no dice. It does make a faint clicking noise for about ten seconds when you plug in the USB cable, but that’s it. Win XP sees the drive, but doesn’t recognize it or list it in the Win Explorer. What do you know about data recovery when the drive fails like this?
February 26th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Nick,
Why do you think it’s the CMOS battery? The laptop should start even if the CMOS battery is discharged or missing. Most likely it’s just a dead hard drive. New hard drives fail too.
February 23rd, 2007 at 10:43 am
My Gateway M305 was working fine for about two weeks, on almost constantly. It quit during the night. When I try to boot it up, it returns the message ‘operating system not found’. The hard drive does not show up in the BIOS either. I have done the usual, remove the battery, reseat the hard drive, etc. Ironically, I just bought a new bigger drive for it, but need the data from the old one. Is it the CMOS battery perhaps? Laptop is over three years old now. Thanks!
February 15th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Elijah Chan,
Test the laptop with an external monitor. If the same white lines (or any other defect) appear on the external video, you have a problem with the video card, not the LCD screen.
If the external monitor works fine and lines appear only on the laptop LCD screen, most likely you have a bad screen and will have to replace it.
February 14th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Sir,
Im using an acer Travel Mate 4150,and I used to have problems with my laptop LCD screens,I have changed them twice thanks to Acer Guarantee.
But recently,sometimes when I restart my laptop,it doesnt go to the Windows XP page but a black screen appears with a few white lines slowly increasing till it covers the whole screen and it becomes white.I will then restart the second time with the same result but when i restart for the third time,it returned to normal and i can get to my Windows XP page.
This started 1 week ago and it does not happen frequently and I did a virus scan but as expected there was no virus and whenever I connected to an external screen it doesnt happen .
I dont know if this added information will help but I have been hibernating my laptop and not shuttng it down properly for the past few months,does that have anyting to do with my problem?Please advise me as to what I should do.
Thanks a lot.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
Paul,
As soon as you turn on the laptop you see a Gateway logo and some text, is it blurry too? If it is, then it’s definitely not a graphics card driver issue because at this point the driver is not even loaded.
Connect an external monitor and check the external video. If you see the same blurry fonts on the monitor too, then you might have an issue with the video card. If the video output on the monitor is fine and the blurriness appears only on the LCD screen, then the problem is located somewhere inside the display assembly. Probably an issue with the screen.
If the blurry text appears on both LCD and external screens and only in Windows, then it’s possible you have a software issue. Reinstalling the video driver might not help. I would reload the entire operating system. The best way to do that is using a recovery CD/DVD.
November 29th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Sir,
(Nice web site! – thanks for help) My problem: I have a Gateway M305 purchased in 02/04. Two weeks ago, the fonts (just like I am typing here) have become weak in color and somewhat blurry. I called Gateway (still on warranty) and they emailed me new drivers for my graphics card that I ‘re-installed.’ The problem has not been solved, the fonts are still weak. Almost like a haze around other images on my screen. Is my LCD screen just too old? Is it the drivers still?
Thanks.
November 26th, 2006 at 12:17 am
Judy,
Did you mean that the laptop works fine with an external monitor? If the laptop works fine with an external monitor and only displays bad video on the internal LCD screen, then probably you’ve damaged the screen.
You have 2 options. 1. Replace the LCD screen. 2. Use the laptop with an external monitor.
November 25th, 2006 at 6:31 am
I have a problem with my Equium A60-692. The screen took a knock last night whilst up and from the back. it wasn’t very hard but the sreen isn’t working properly. Pictures are the worst effected as they are more like negatives and very red. The screen has been tested by conecting to a computer and the image is working fine on that. I’m using it now so it’s definately the screen and can be used but not sure how long it will be before i get totally fed up with it. Any suggestions as to what I can do would be very much appreciated.
Judy Young
November 6th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
After a good night’s sleep, I continue with my problem. There were two other little cirles which I probed with a tiny screw driver and founf “soft” They were little discs out of paper thin plastic. After I lifted them odd, a screw head appeared. I was able to loosen the LCD and intall my new wireless antenna.
The tine hole under the rubber seals turned out to be of no function I could determine. The mask snapped right off after I remopved the screws. Thanks for your reply.
November 5th, 2006 at 10:45 am
Ozario,
I haven’t worked with Satellite 1905 laptops for a long time. I do not remember if the display screws are special in this model. Are you sure that the screw has a tiny hole in the middle? Take a closer look at the hole in the middle of the screw, isn’t it shaped as Hex or Torx? Go to the type of screw drive section in Wikipedia to identify the type of the screwdriver.
November 4th, 2006 at 7:49 am
In most of your LCD disassembly guides, you start off with removing the seals for the screws holding the LCD mask. I have a Satellite 1905, when I remove the two seals on the bottom of the screen, there is a screw, not phillips head but looks like a flate head with a tiny hole in the middle. What kind of screw is this and how do I remove it ??