[Wolves] [SB] how do i get grub to switch to external monitor

[Mark Croft Redditch Linux Mint]

the monitor is fine its my 48" LG HDMI tv in the living room and it
works fine with other laptops and old dell desktop etc.


i have tried all combinations of key presses , the manual says fn+f4
which does nothing.
only one i found working is f4 but thats at the point when the machine
is in windows and waiting for password(which i do not have? any
solutions to that?) i need to swap the windows hard drive back into
the machine to play with windows more not sure i will get very far cos
i can't login into it. i think its windows 7 not 100% sure. i will get
back to you on that.

interesting advice on get from the support forums -
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2949038/switching-external-monitor-asap-bios-screen-compaq-cq58-broken-screen.html#17395878

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Video-Display-and-Touch/switching-to-external-monitor-ASAP-so-i-get-into-BIOS-screen/td-p/5464509


On 27 January 2016 at 14:47, Adam Sweet <adamsweet at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27/01/16 12:13, Mark Croft Redditch Linux Mint wrote:
>> i have a compaq cq58 that has a broken screen that have been taken out.
>>
>> i have been told that the vga driver is not installed so i can't get
>> bios screen up without a new screen installed in this laptop.
>> http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Video-Display-and-Touch/switching-to-external-monitor-ASAP-so-i-get-into-BIOS-screen/m-p/5467874/highlight/false#M125443
>
> As the HP support forum agent and others here have said, there's no OS
> driver involved at the BIOS level. Attaching a monitor using VGA should
> either just work, or you need to find the keyboard sequence which turns
> the VGA port on. You mentioned the manual says F4, others here mentioned
> holding down the Function or Fn key and pressing F4 and having tried
> those it still won't fire up the external monitor.
>
>> is there a way to get grub to take control of the laptop and switch it
>> over to external screen making it possible to boot off usb stick and
>> then install linux on that hard drive.
>
> You shouldn't need to mess with grub to make it drive an external
> monitor, it should just use whatever monitor the BIOS was using.
>
> At this point, I would be thinking the following:
>
> 1) Does my monitor actually work?
> 2) Does my VGA cable actually work?
>
> If you can prove the above by connecting them to something else, then
> move on.
>
> 3) Can I boot into a Linux live distro either from USB or optical drive,
> which doesn't require any kind of interaction or nothing more than a
> simple predictable key press to be able to boot to a graphical display
> screen (you'll need to try this on another machine to ensure you know
> what to do to get a GUI when you can't see anything) and then try F4 and
> function-F4.
>
> 5) Once in a live disk environment, if the monitor doesn't fire up on
> its own and using F4 and function-F4 don't fire it up then you're going
> to have to accept that either:
>
> a) The VGA port doesn't work
> b) You don't know the key sequence to enable an external display
> c) The key sequence for enabling an external display really is a Windows
> only driver feature.
>
> Once you get to this point, you won't get this laptop running Linux
> without a new display. I see from your forum post that the external
> display does work in Windows, in which case, that may be your only
> choice. You explicitly state it works only on the login screen, so if it
> doesn't work after logging in, then you'll probably find yourself out of
> luck.
>
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>
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