Is it possible Win10 could be preventing Laptop from displaying to external monitor

[teatimecrumpet]

Hi, my Lenovo U310 Touch with Win10 has a broken screen and it used to connect to an external monitor but now no longer does.

I wanted to know is it possible that the OS or bios could be preventing the laptop from displaying to an external monitor? The laptop only has an HDMI output so not sure if that affects some kind of order in which the laptop would try to output.

In other words, should hitting the right fn keys and unplugging the screen definitively force it to display to an external monitor? I'd like to get this running headless again my idea is that maybe I could find the right LCD attach it just to change some settings on the OS and then run headless again.

Thanks and Happy New Year

 

[webworkings]

It is more likely that the graphics card/GPU is the problem. Which may actually mean that the motherboard be replaced as well, depending on how yours is set up.

That is what is the usual problem when both the attached display and any external monitor both won't work.

 

[teatimecrumpet]

It is more likely that the graphics card/GPU is the problem. Which may actually mean that the motherboard be replaced as well, depending on how yours is set up.

That is what is the usual problem when both the attached display and any external monitor both won't work.

Thanks, forgot to mention that the broken screen is physically broken/cracked so it didn't just go dark. Do you still think the GPUmotherboard could be the problem?

 

[webworkings]

If you can't get an external monitor to work by setting it up this way....

Turn laptop off (off not hibernate/sleep), then connect the external monitor. Turn on the external monitor and then turn on the laptop.

If you can't see on the the external monitor, then yes, I stand by what I said before.

 

[teatimecrumpet]

So I went ahead and found a really cheap LCD panel just to test it with and it worked and what showed was some error message that I couldn't get past because I couldn't see I had to click through it. I forget what the error message said exactly but it basically said an error had occurred and the computer needed to be restarted. It didn't look like a bios message that says it didn't shutdown properly it was like a Lenovo styled screen. I tried to restart a couple of times but got the same error so I had to do the onetouch recovery and wiped the drive and did a reinstall.

After the reinstall the laptop output to the external monitor right away.

Not sure how an error message prevents hdmi display. I'm pretty sure I was able to access bios when I was trying to troubleshoot so I suspect it should have output to the external when in bios.

 

[webworkings]

You should still have access to BIOS. However if 'fastboot' is enabled, it won't let you access BIOS when starting up. It would have to be disabled first.