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Randomly this morning when I turned on an old laptop, the backlight came on but nothing came on screen. Okay, thats weird, but I wanted to see what would happen. So then the lubuntu login screen came up, and the entire screen is a bunch of light blue vertical lines, the same color as the login screen.

I've tried lots of things, including goofing around with the screen, pulling up the recovery console, and running on battery. Nothing worked.

Last night someone else used the laptop and they said they did nothing out of the ordinary. Just used it and turned it off, leaving the power plugged in as normal.

The only issues I've had with the LCD is the LCD not even coming on at boot (A well known issue to this Laptop line) and randomly the screen will go black with some white-ish hue at the top for a second or two then go back to normal. I've never seen it where the entire screen is vertical lines.

Any suggestions?

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This sounds like a hardware failure to me, not a software problem, especially since it's had some similar problems before. Stewart's suggestion to try a live CD will rule out the software question.

Either the signal cable to the screen has developed a fault, or the supply of power to the screen is dying. In any case, I'm pretty sure that some bit of hardware needs to be replaced. Depending on the age of the laptop, that might not be the best use of your money. Perhaps it's wiser to buy a new laptop?

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  • This is an ancient laptop but I was hoping to see if anything could fix it. I disassembled the screen and messed with the connector to no avail. I guess its time to get rid of this thing. Thanks for the answer
    – TheLQ
    Aug 5, 2010 at 22:08
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on boot after the bios screen has finished, press "esc" to bring you into the grub boot menu, if you have older kernel boot options try them to see if it's an issue with an updated kernel.

If there are no other boot options shown to you, or if GRUB doesn't show up try a live CD (such as the Lubuntu install disk). insert that and try to boot from it. It could be just a broken graphics driver or inadvertently changed xorg config.

If the machine boots from cd, your monitor is fine. If not, try another live cd (such as system rescue cd)...

I think that's enough to get you started. .. Or a least booted into an os of some sort.

Stewart

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  • Lubuntu does not hide the grub menu, I see it every time that I boot up. This is an issue with the LCD, not the OS since the login screen is there, just the LCD is screwing it up
    – TheLQ
    Aug 5, 2010 at 17:32

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