I have a Dell Latitude E5400. It won’t boot up. Power comes on, the hard drive is being accessed, and the screen will go from black to dark grey but otherwise the screen is blank. I took the battery out, and it still won’t work. I do hear the little three note chime, but nothing ever happens. Any troubleshooting clues?
Is it trying to display to an external monitor, perhaps? Try pushing Fn+F8 on its keyboard.
No that does not do anything. The way the hard drive light is flashing it looks like it is trying to start, but no words, not even the press F2 comes on.
I don’t know what model you have, but POST codes tend to be pretty stable. If this isn’t even close, search on your model with the words dell latitude post codes.
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The sound I mentioned is not a POST code, but rather the little chimey sound you always hear when booting.
When it’s running shine a bright light on the screen; do you see anything on it?
It might be worth looking at that link. there’s a lot more to it.
What link is that? I would like to try it.
Or plug it into a regular monitor and try the same key combination if nothing comes up.
If it works fine on monitor, you will have either a damaged video cable, a bad backlight, a bad backlight inverter, or some kind of screen failure.
Sigh. Very sorry.
Thank you very much. I had no idea that it would flash a code instead of beep one.
However, no code at all was enunciated.
Seconding the idea that it’s a screen issue. It sounds like when my backlight went out. Try plugging in to an external monitor as drachillix suggested.
Was a screen issue. Now I can make sure I back everything up and search for a new laptop. This one is way old.
Thank you all very very much.