Resetting a mobility M7 7500

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 8:26 AM, James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "MD" == Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> writes:
>
>>> My (old!) laptop stopped displaying anything tonight.
>>>
>>> The bios displays (including the bios passwd display, setup, grub menu,
>>> etc) all are blank on both the lcd and vga.
>
> MD> Did those show up on VGA before?
>
> Presumably, but it has never been connected to an external monitor
> before....
>
> There is a CRT/LCD Fn key, but that didn't do anything noticeable, given
> the lack of display.
>
> MD> I don't think there's anything to reset on the GPU itself. It sounds
> MD> like either one of your BIOS images got corrupted, or something related
> MD> to the LVDS panel physically broke.
>
> [SIGH].  Re-flashing will be a pain w/o a display....
>
> MD> Please provide dmesg and Xorg.0.log.
>
> forthcoming....
>
>>> PS  Should the M7 be able to read the EDID across VGA?
>
> MD> Generally yes.
>
> Either w/ or w/o a vga monitor dmesg shows:
>
>       DDC: 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60
>

Those are the ddc pads generally used for VGA.  It sounds like perhaps
your graphics chip is starting to come unseated from the motherboard
and perhaps some of the pins are no longer making good contact.  Heat
and flexing and time can cause that to happen on some old laptops.
That would explain the LVDS and VGA DDC problems.

Alex

> -JimC
> --
> James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
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