Connecting Computers Question

Hello.. it's been ages since I've been here.
I switched to Linux about 5 years ago and washed all that windows trauma away.

I have a tower (built by magic micro) that has Linux Mint on it and for some reason, while running, the monitor just went blank. The monitor seems to be OK... turns on and off with the familiar blip indicating life. Somewhere on either an external hard drive or flash drive, I have it's belarc output.. can't find it.
The tower was sitting for a long time.. and had been up for maybe two hours doing updates before it stopped showing visuals. It was on.. didn't shut down.

I also have a working HP laptop with Linux Mint on it.
Is it at all possible to hook the laptop to the tower to diagnose what's going on with it?
If so, how?
I'm guessing it's either the graphics card or the primary hard drive.

Thanks

 

If your laptop has the same type of video output plug as your monitor, you could hookup the laptop to it to confirm the monitor is still working as it should.
As far as I know there is no real way of connecting the laptop to the pc to do any type of troubleshooting. You can pull the hard drive from PC, and connect it through USB to the laptop and do testing on it. You will need an adapter to connect the hard drive to a USB. Something like this would work with most hard drives.

 

Thank you for the reply A1pha
Sadly. the monitor is VGA and the laptop is HDMI.
I was hoping to not tear down the tower right away. It's get the garden ready season here.
There are two SATA drives in there. I wish I remembered which is the OS and which is operational storage.
I do have an external docking port for SATA drives.. maybe two since I ordered an extra when I couldn't locate one after moving.
Since now I'm going inside, I will likely order a back up graphics card too, just in case.

 

They do make adapters for VGA to HDMI , the first one that showed up on a search here. Very inexpensive.

 

id say both sata drives are worth a shot connecting to another device, im curious what the result would be. responding to this running mint aswell!

 

Did the desktop have a post beep when it powered on before & doesn't now? Maybe open the case and look for info on the motherboard and find a manual for it. Look for any LEDs or any troubleshooting guidance.
Does the fan on the power supply spin up when turned on? Any fans in the case? Any LEDs light up?

Could you use the laptop? You can get a USB KVM ( Openterface USB KVM - Sipeed NanoKVM-USB) or "crashcart" adapter, but that will just give you another screen and keyboard/mouse. A bit of money to spend just to check for a bad monitor.