Hi, i hope this is the right section for this issue...

For many years i used my laptop without particular problems, but now i got one.

I never seen a strange thing like this:

When i power on my laptop with a bootable cd, before booting i can see the picture and the console (the one that says 'boot options: ') but it is really transparent.. i mean i can (hardly) see the screen but is like watching through a piece of paper...

Plus, if i power on my laptop booting from hd the screen is black, totally black...

In the two cases after waiting the time count, it boots up correctly and i see everything clearly!

So, i can see BIOS message, i can't see nothing, i can see 'loading... etc.'

What do you think?

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!
Not much information to work with.

FYI: I suggest that you look at 'How to Ask Questions the Smart Way' so in the future your queries provide information that will aid us in diagnosis of the problem or query.



It may be the BIOS setup, check there for boot settings. If the screen is dimmed after POST then IPL(Initial Program Load) or SPL (boot) then the problem could be the bootloader setup. Grub/Lilo? Distribution?

Just shooting in the dark without the information.

The first thing I would do is run memtest86.

So, does this happen randomly, or is it triggered by something.

Yep you are right! i forgot everything, ops

My distribution is based on LFS 6.8
Bootloader is GRUB 1.98

All what i can see is pc specs and the line at the bottom ('Press F2 to enter setup'), the very first screen, i tried to enter BIOS setup (by pressing F2) and it is dimmed! I can't see menu, options etc..

I found this problem because i tried to enter grub console, it works but i can't see nothing and i have to type commands in blind mode.

Is the screen ever not dimmed ? If it is dimmed even in the BIOS setup then it is probably a hardware issue. The simplest thing it could be on a laptop is the screen dimmer button getting stuck on (on laptops that have such a button). It could be the backlight is dieing or dead. I could be the video card, but is unlikely because this would also probably cause graphical glitches.

It could also be the RAM if symptoms are random, that's why I said to try memtest86.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yeah, it is probably an hardware issue because symptoms are not random, only happens at startup...

I'm gonna check for that later.

Thanks for your help!

It's a shot in the dark, but is there a hardware screen brightness control? My laptops have them on the function keys.

I recently installed a new Linux OS and the screen was dimmed. Perhaps your laptop is starting with the screen dimmed.