Can you boot a laptop with an hdmi connection?

[kaywalker]

My girlfriend's laptop's display doesn't work anymore and she needs her files from her hard drive. Before attempting to take the hard drive out to recover the files I thought I'd connect the laptop to a monitor with the hdmi out on the laptop. What I'm wondering is if I connect it to another monitor with the hdmi and boot, will it show up or do you have to switch the output once you're in windows? She has a password on her windows user (vista) and it won't start windows until you put the password in and we obviously can't because we can't see it. So will connecting it to the hdmi help or no?

 

[WR2]

Is there another video output besides HDMI?

 

[jaguarskx]

Sadly, that is not going to work.

When you connect an external monitor to a video card, you will need to set it up in the Control panel. Since you cannot see what you are doing due to the broken screen, there is no way for you properly configure the second monitor.

In this case, your only option is to remove the hard drive and install on another PC to retrieve her files.