Dell Inspiron 1520 Help Needed

Hello,
A friend gave me her 1520 to fix. The LCD screen is completely destroyed. We were using it with an external monitor for a while and then she forgot to plug it into the power one night and the battery was completely drained and the laptop powered off. I think all the power management setting were set so it would not turn off or go into sleep mode when the battery was low. When we put the adapter back on the laptop, it would not boot into Windows or display anything on the external monitor. I played around with it a bit and decided to reformat it. I was able to format it once but it would give me a blank screen when booting into Windows after the install. I decided to try the format again but this time during the windows setup, it would not detect the hard drive at all. I tried different Windows Xp Cd's and a Vista DVD, none would see the harddrive. I took out the HD and put it into an external case and my desktop detected it just fine. I gave it a clean format again and put it back into the laptop and got the same detection issue.

I got a little curious so I tried to mess with the boot priority, for some reason the BIOS screen would not display on the external monitor (pressing the hot key makes the screen flash, but I get no BIOS display) but I used part of the LCD that was still viewable and my Dell laptop to walk myself thruogh the key strokes. Unfortunately I think I disabled all the boot devices and/or messed up the boot order and cannot get it corrected.

Now since that is all in the open here are my main questions:
-Can I remove the CMOS battery to restore the BIOS settings to default? Would this require me to reload anything? This is the only way I can think of restoring the boot order.

-I plan on getting a new LCD for this laptop eventually but I do not want to spend money on it if there is some other hardware issue. Does it seem like something else may have been damaged when the power was drained from the laptop? The hard drive works fine, I cannot think of what else to try.

-Why doesn't the external monitor display the BIOS? Is this something that is not possible or am I missing something?


Thanks!

 

Any Suggestions?

 

1) Removing the CMOS battery will reset the BIOS. This won't require you to reload anything. You may have to reset the time.

2) Test it on AC, on battery, and see if the battery charges. If these are working fine and you aren't experiencing any other problems with the machine, it is probably in reasonable working order. If you can run some sort of Dell diagnostics, even better.

3) Try unplugging the internal display. You don't need to take it off, just unplug it.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins1520/en/sm/display.htm#wp1179838