[Atheist]

I wasn't exactly sure where to put this as it's in regards to a "HacBook". I've posted on Hackintosh oriented forums but not gotten any replies. I thought I'd try my luck here as there are a fair amount of folks I believe have sufficient expertise to offer up good advice.

I've got a Dell Latitude D630 which is generally regarded as an easily Hackintoshed laptop. I've been running OS X on it since 10.5. This past weekend, I decided to upgrade from 10.6.2. to 10.6.4. After running the combo update, the computer rebooted and followed the normal boot process. First the grey screen with the Apple logo and spinning wheel, next came the blank blue screen that flashes up briefly before the desktop appears. But that's where the trouble started. Instead of seeing the desktop, the screen went all white with faint vertical lines. I'd actually seen that behavior before and the solution was to remove the GMAX3100 kext files. I was going to try that again except when I rebooted the machine I didn't even get the normal post screen. The display was still all white. I swapped out the hard drive with one that has windows 7 to no avail. The display is totally borked.

So the million dollar question. Can a video driver irreparably damage an LCD display? My company is pretty accommodating and going to give me another D630 but I'm afraid the same thing might happen again. Bear in mind that 2 weeks ago I had to get a new D630 because the internal power supply shorted out.... so this will be my third machine in 2 weeks.

Thoughts/Suggestions?

(sorry if this is in the wrong forum)

[reader50]

I don't know the answer unfortunately, but how do you know the display did not die on it's own? If the display simply died at some point, you'd tend to blame whatever you did last. ie - you plugged in a new USB mouse, and would be asking us if we've ever seen a USB device damage the built-in monitor. The fact your last Dell laptop died may indicate Dell had a bad production run.

Apple has been fooling with the video drivers of late. Hardware Flash acceleration, improved game performance on Steam games, etc. On a desktop I'd suggest an SMU reset.

Try unplugging the laptop, remove the battery, and press the hidden Dell equivalent of the SMU reset button.

[Atheist]

It could have been coincidental, but the timing is very suspect. I forgot to mention that the computer runs fine with an external monitor. The only kind of reset I can figure out to do is via the BIOS but of course I can see what I'm doing since the screen is white.

My earlier hardware failure was more than likely my doing. I was plugging in an external hard drive via one of those cheap USB to SATA adapters. Little did I know that those are famous for wreaking havoc so I don't blame Dell for that one.

Hopefully this was just a coincidental failure of the LCD display. Guess I'll find out soon enough.

[seanc]

It could just be the LVDS cable.
Usually a blank white display indicates no signal to the LCD. If it's not the cable, it could be a fuse on the LCD circuitry that has failed. Why? I don't know.

[hmsed]

@Atheist

Did you ever find out what was wrong?

I'm very interested as the situation is almost identical with my D630.

[Atheist]

Nope.. never did figure out what exactly happened.

[hmsed]

OK, thank you.