what to do when video stops working?

[Colin McGregor]

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 3:44 PM,  <matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> my aging laptop has stopped producing a video signal; even on POST, the
> screen remains blank, and an external monitor plugged into the VGA port also
> gives nothing -- though the monitor power light glows green, suggesting the
> monitor sees that it's connected to something.
>
> as far as i can tell this problem started when i had the laptop up & running
> unattended; the screen was blank, the fan was running like a jet engine, and
> i ssh'ed in to shutdown remotely.  the shutdown failed but sshd was stopped,
> and i did a hard reset; now when i turn it on, it seems like GRUB is
> probably loading, but that boot is maybe interrupted by a filesystem error
> or something, because the network never comes up.
>
> anyway i'm wondering if there's a way to get data out of the machine to help
> with diagnosing the problem, even in the absence of a video cable.  I've
> heard you can do this with a "serial console" -- can anyone tell me more?
>  there's a serial port on the back of the machine, but i've never used it &
> don't really know how to begin with it.

It is possible to connect two machines via the serial ports and then
have one log into the other via that serial cable. You can then have a
text based console screen. The gotcha being that the machine you want
to log into must have been configured to allow a serial port login.
Typically distributions by default do not allow a serial port login,
and from the sound of things you can't currently get in to change the
defaults...

So, what I would do if I were in your shoes... A typical laptop uses
2.5" hard drives, a typical desktop PC uses 3.5" hard drives. In your
case I assume you're likely talking IDE/EIDE. There are 2.5" to 3.5"
IDE/EIDE adapters that will let you connect an EIDE laptop drive to a
typical desktop PC EIDE cable. I would get one of those adapters,
remove the hard drive from the laptop connect it up using the adapter
as a slave drive in the desktop. Boot with your normal Linux distro.,
then start mounting the partitions on the laptop drive. This way you
can see any/all log files in /var/log, and if the laptop is truly
fried you can at least recover the data off the laptop...

> appreciate any help y'all can give!  best,
> matt

Colin.
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