Laptop Screen goes blank after boot screen

[airman]

Well...title implies it all. My cousin brought it to me and said "nothing comes up on the screen when i boot it up", which i thought it just wasn't posting.

 

get it home, and i turn it on - posts, then shows windows xp loading, THEN the screen goes blank. at first i thought, hmm...system file gone bad or something, but then there goes the familiar windows xp logon sound chimes, then all those little background "pops" when those balloons come up in the taskbar. which...confuses me. i woulda thought if there was a problem windows would have hung up. so i think, maybe it's a problem with the display driver and has swapped the displays [as in extended monitor or whatever]. so i plug in a spare monitor to the vga port, same problem. nothing on that screen either. keep in mind, it still posts/etc, so it's not hardware.

 

SO, i try safe mode. on the boot log, where it shows all the files getting loaded, i believe it hangs on the "agp440.sys" or whatever it's called. i know it takes a while for that one to load, but it had taken about 2 minutes, so i got up and left. came back about half an hour later [forgot about it] and it was off.

 

tried a "boot from last good known configuration", same thing happens. screen goes blank after the xp loading screen goes.

 

 

 

i am 90% sure a reinstall would fix this, i just want to leave that as a last resort considering i don't have a disk for xp home, only my xp pro disk and i'd rather not share a license.

 

any ideas?

 

 

by the way, it's a gateway laptop, solo v1450, windows xp home.

[jack_of_java]

Has he installed any new video drivers lately? Or messed with the catalyst drivers? Possibly either a corrupt graphics driver? Maybe even that the resolution/frequency set too high? I would try booting into safe mode, uninstalling the graphics driver, and then reinstalling it....

Edited April 27, 2007 by jack_of_java

[silkster]

Has he installed any new video drivers lately? Or messed with the catalyst drivers? Possibly either a corrupt graphics driver? Maybe even that the resolution/frequency set too high? I would try booting into safe mode, uninstalling the graphics driver, and then reinstalling it....

 

Well said! That's the first thing I would do.

[Nemo]

Microsoft KB Article: Problems when Windows XP tries to load the Agp440.sys service

SYMPTOMS

When you install Windows XP, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

 

[airman]

@silkster/jack - i can't get in using safe mode. in my original post i said that it hung while loading agp440.sys.

 

i thought about the idea of the resolution out of range, which is why i said in my original post that i tried a monitor laying around - capable of 1600x1200. so unless there was a huge bug i doubt it would be able to set itself above that range.

 

@nemo: i'd try that, but she doesn't have any original disks [aka the windows cd]. would a windows xp PRO cd work? as i have one i may try to do so.

 

[edit]

used my xp pro cd and the recovery console but it didn't seem to help. tried booting regular, same problem. for safe mode: while logging the system devices/services, it doesn't show up agp440sys, obviously because i've disabled it - however the same symptom occurs, except that it's on "Mup.sys". this one can't be a problem because it got PAST it when agp440.sys was stil enabled.

 

so...back to the drawing board. we now know that it's not an issue with the agp440.sys though.