How to access laptop w/o video?

[bilboe]

Hello!
I have acquired a good laptop, but it's video does not work (neither the monitor or external video), however, i can hear the fans spinning and what not. How would i use it? Is it possible to access the bios over ethernet or something?

Thank you!

 

[GhislainG]

Is it possible to access the bios over ethernet or something?

This is not possible with a laptop, but even if it was through a dedicated Ethernet interface, you would need video to configure it. Is it worth getting it fixed?

 

[donpacific2k]

I'm assuming since you want to go to the trouble of using a broken laptop, you want the advanced user solution without paying $$ to get it fixed. It seems to me your best bet would be to make a boot disc to run on the laptop, with fixed network settings so that you can SSH or VNC onto it from another computer. I can't think of any way to access the BIOS menu without being really clever. Maybe there's some utility you could put on the boot disk to do a bios dump so you'd at least know what the settings are, and then either update it, or blindly key in whatever changes you want to make (I'm guessing there's nothing helpful you could do in the bios anyway, except change the boot order if you want to use a boot disc instead of the hard drive)

 

[bilboe]

I'm assuming since you want to go to the trouble of using a broken laptop, you want the advanced user solution without paying $$ to get it fixed. It seems to me your best bet would be to make a boot disc to run on the laptop, with fixed network settings so that you can SSH or VNC onto it from another computer. I can't think of any way to access the BIOS menu without being really clever. Maybe there's some utility you could put on the boot disk to do a bios dump so you'd at least know what the settings are, and then either update it, or blindly key in whatever changes you want to make (I'm guessing there's nothing helpful you could do in the bios anyway, except change the boot order if you want to use a boot disc instead of the hard drive)

Thank you. That is what i was thinking of doing. Any ideas as to making a bootable vnc cd?