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Aaaaargh!
So there I was browsing away on my PowerMac laptop..... lots of tabs open.... and it froze. So I pressed the on/off button to force a reboot, which it did fine, but the screen stays black! It makes the startup noise and the keyboard lights come on so all appears ok except no display. Any ideas anybody????
Connect it to an external monitor.
If it works it's the screen or the settings, if it doesn't then it's some kind of settings or it's broken.
Look closely, is the screen black or just really, really dark?
How old is it?
I had this once, the trick from the net was to type your log in password and press return.
Don’t have an external monitor. Can you connect it to a TV using an HDMI cable I wonder..... If so would that be via the Thunderbolt port? Even if this connection does work will I not have to be able to see the Mac laptop screen to in order to activate this connection?
The moral of this story is always backup your data.
first, a hdmi cable willwork, depends on which Mac as to which adaptor you need,
second, if it is dead, depending on which it is you may be able to remove the HD buy a usb case and connect to a second Mac to recover data, really depends on what has died
PowerMac or PowerBook? Both are pretty old school. It's done well to make it this far.
Zap the PRAM Press the power button, then hold down the Option & Command + P & R keys until you hear the startup chime at least twice
Maybe find and old monitor with VGA/DVI display ports and try and connect to that.
Did you try letting it boot and just typing in your password?
Probably the backlight failed. Shine a torch through the logo on the back of the screen to see if it’s working.
https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/mac-startup-options/
try those start up options.
I'd try holding alt first, to let you select the drive to boot from, if that works, might just be something gone wrong with your install.
If that works, try booting into safe mode(hold shift), then restarting, that alone might work.
if not try the pram thingy.
if none of those work, it's probably just the screen has gone I'd have a guess at. so you'll need to get it replaced.
I'd guess your data will be fine btw, if it's making start up noises, if it was the disk, you'd get a missing disk icon showing up, the screen would work fine.
ps macs used to go a bit mental when the PRAM battery was flat too, years ago, dunno if that's relevant to modern machines mind.