Dual monitor major disater!!!help!!!

Hello,

I recently hooked up a acer external monitor to my compact presario v6404au because the lcd screen was smashed. I thought id be a hero and have a look at the resolution settings. I changed it to dual settings. I had the desktop background showing on the external but no tool bar or anything so i disconnected the screen from the laptop. Now i can not connect monitor back into the laptop? It keeps coming up with no signal. I have disconnected the broken screen from the laptop hoping it might of picked up the external as its default but no luck?


Please can someone help me? I just wanna get info off the laptop instead of paying a tech hundreds just to get something easy off the laptop.

 

Your going to need to boot into safe mode. When the computer leave the BIOS screen, press F8 rapidly on your keyboard. Using the arrow keys high "Safe Mode" and press enter.

Once into Safe Mode (XP):
1. Start
2. Control Panel
3. System
4. Hardware Tab
5. Device Manager
6. Display Adapters (Click the plus sign to the left)
7. Right click on the adapters and choose uninstall.
8. Restart the computer.

 

Hi there. Thanks for the fast reply. Will this work even though my external monitor can not pick up signal from my laptop? The acer screen will pop up and I'd continuesly press fn-f4 but still picks up no signal?

 

I may be wrong but I don't see how booting is Safe mode is going to help, since nothing can be seen on the laptop screen.

Do you have another computer? If so, I would remove the hard drive from the laptop and connect it to the other computer as a second hard drive. How this can be done can depend on whether the other computer is a laptop or desktop/tower system.

If you have another computer and feel my suggestion is something you're reasonably comfortable with, let us know. I'll be away from my computer for some hours today but will check in later. Of course, other forum members can help, too.

If you do not feel confident about removing a laptop hard drive and connecting it to another computer (which may require purchase of an external hard drive enclosure or other hardware devices), then I'd ask for an estimate from a shop before proceeding to have them do this. Getting some files off your laptop hard drive should be a fairly easy task for them.

Actually, you could go ahead and buy an external enclosure for a laptop hard drive and, instead of paying a repair shop to retrieve files off your laptop hard drive, you could have them just remove the hard drive from your laptop and install it in the external enclosure. This may cost less, even with the cost of the external enclosure, than paying the shop to retrieve files off the hard drive.

External enclosures create external hard drives from regular hard drives. They can be connected to any computer with a USB port. So, you would have access to your files and also have an external hard drive for long-term use as a backup device that could be used with any computer.

For an extensive selection of external enclosures, see http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010010092 1053807124&name=2.5"

 

I think this is due to the fact that the laptop is attempting to display on the broken screen. There should be an Fn key on the laptop, and across the top of the keyboard there should be a symbol of a pair of screens with a line between them, or similar.

Plug the external monitor in, turn it on, and hold the Fn key. Then press the screen change key that I described above. This should rotate the display onto the external screen. If this does not work, try pressing it again.

 

Are you sure all laptops have this feature? I have a Compaq Presario Notebook PC and I don't see such a key.

 

Pretty sure. Otherwise there would be no way to rotate the display through multiple monitors.
The key combo is normally Fn + F5 or Fn + F6

 

Nope, there's definitely no fn + f key combination on my notebook PC that "rotates" between the notebook's own screen and the external monitor. I did find some references about fn + f4 to toggle between main computer screen and a projector or display device connected to an S-video port.

As I previously said, I have an external monitor attached (to VGA port) but I've never used a projector or any device using S-video with this computer. So, I don't know for sure that's how the fn + f4 combo works but it seems so based on references from an Internet search.

 

On this basis I withdraw my comment that I am "Pretty sure" that all laptops have this feature. It still might apply to the OP, though.