Destroyed screen (and probably everything else too)

Hey guys, what’s up?

I bring you another challenge at the height of the Manjarini eheheh, a computer completely smashed.

Years ago I had a nice Packard bell, an i3 with even 1gb of integrated graphics card with cuda, where I had installed a nice linux operating system, it is now at least 8 years since the heart of this laptop was still beating.

Today I bring it here to you, to defibrillate what remains of its miserable and honored life XD

Looking through the old stuff I found it and I thought it was a shame not to use it anymore, maybe in the worst case I can install a nice server to offer some free service to all the fools who will be able to navigate in it.

Basically, in fact, officially only the screen is devastated, it fell on the ground, I won’t tell you how or you will laugh until the next millennium XD
Now I tried to plug it into the mains, and it seems to “light up” naturally with a completely black screen, but the veins start, a bit too much for my taste.

I mean, the laptop turns on, lights work, but the fans go on and off, as if something is wrong.

I would love to restore it, but it seems like I can’t do it myself.

I tried to connect it to the TV through an HDMI cable but it doesn’t seem to work, the TV doesn’t detect it, do you have any idea? Do you think the internal parts still work? How could I connect it to some screen to have the opportunity to fiddle with it a bit and make it a good old friend of misfortune?

Thank you all in advance,

                     Phoenix

Hi @Phoenix. When you turn on your laptop, can you boot into the BIOS setup screen? Or does it also give a black (dead) screen?

The noise of the fans isn’t a big problem I think. Mine does also blow a few seconds when turning it on.

But if you don’t have a screen when entering your laptop setup, I really think you have a problem :worried:

Get an appointment of one of your local computer repair shops so they may check it out. With a busted screen normally external monitors will get detected in a much later stage. So it is hard to tell if you are able to get it running in one way or the other. Older laptops also had still a battery for the BIOS, you may want to check that too.

Hello @Lunix,

my computer hardware about the screen is dead, so bios or whatever else you see on the screen is impossible to consider (HDMI aside) if you could access it.

The fans on my computer are not only blowing when I turn it on, but they’re always on and off, as if something is wrong, it’s been on for over 24 hours and the fans haven’t stopped running yet.

I also think that if the computer screen is gone, there is some problem, if not, it would not be an excellent idea to post here on the forum.

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Yes @philm, I thought I’d take it to repair, but I think the value for money is a failure in this case, I don’t have to repair a modern and efficient computer that I can use all day, but it’s an old computer, which I want to use more for the pleasure of doing something constructive, to repair something, or just learn something new more than a utility material, see it as a game for fun.

Surely it has an internal battery that serves for the bios as well as the one you need to keep the charge, but apart from resetting the user account and then baipassing the old password and accessing the whole system (which is a good idea as maybe HDMI would work in this case) I wouldn’t have a great utility, but the idea is good and I thought about it yesterday as soon as I turned it on, and remembering it is useful as I haven’t started to do it yet.

If you really want this thing to have an honorable death - consider booting an ISO with an sshd service enabled.

The current unstable iso for Openbox gives you a sshd in live session only.

If you an make it boot on that you can connect using the default manjaro:manjaro combo and install over ssh using either the architect script or the CLI install guide found on the forum (remember to install and enable sshd (openssh) - so you don’t get busted when rebooting.

All that of course is relying on the system booting to USB as primary - which you will have to enable using some kind of external monitor.

Some usage which springs to mind is local dns and dhcp - maybe even a nextcloud instance.

Gentilissimo @linux-aarhus, I smell a solution, and I who until a few moments ago, I was about to suggest to my computer to practice a painful and silent Harakiri definitive and without return, like formatting with perennial overwriting for 24 times with subsequent vacation in a defibrillator that does not resuscitate, but ends.
To then bury him in the memories of an honored and glorious service to the Sith XD forces.
Joking aside, the idea of the sshd is very good and also a lot, you will have to do everything terminal, so I will always be in the company of my headache and I will not have to be bored alone even when I sleep XD.

Excuse me for asking, but could you define some more accurate indications, or maybe link some guide and/or procedure?
Pretend that you are talking to a complete ass, which is not so far from the truth, (not braying), but if you would be kind enough to assist me in this operation so obscure to my knowledge, I would be grateful, and if it pleases you, I could even tell you as a terminal :slight_smile:

Thank you in advance for your time.
And thanks also to all the others for their valuable contributions.

EDIT: The only detail about the external monitor is that I don’t have a VGA cable, and even though I have an HDMI cable that works on TV and Manjaro, it doesn’t seem to work on that old computer, maybe because something has to be activated at startup, or maybe just because I can’t see the screen, I can turn it on but not login.

Well it is obviously difficult - if not impossible - if you can’t get it to boot a USB stick.

The easiest path - relatively speaking - will be to create an installation with USB stick at the entire system.

A CLI system can easily exist on a 8GB stick and can be created using your usual workstation.

This brings me to one of the older guides from the archived forum