Arch Linux

Arkips

Member

Registered: 2018-08-08

Posts: 7

Laptop Screen Suddenly Black

Good Morning,

My laptop screen (Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen) suddenly went black last night. Looking closely I can see it is still working, but it is so dark it is impossible to read anything. I can plug a HDMI cable into it and the external monitor works fine and all other functionality is normal.

- xrandr shows eDP1 is connected
- Changes to brightness setting are having no effect. The file /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness and /actual_brightness show brightness is currently at 100%
- Internal display cable is connected properly
- I have since updated the system and rebooted

It feels like the backlight has completely gone out but other than the brightness file I don't know what I should be testing/checking.

At the time it happened I was just scrolling Firefox so I am very confused what has caused this. I initially thought it was a hardware problem but the fact it is still outputting makes me think it is software.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,686

Re: Laptop Screen Suddenly Black

Boot the arch installation iso or some live distro and see whether the backlight is up there.
I assume there's no parallel windows?

The symptoms and "suddenly" make me worry that the backlight physically broke - this has no impact on other outputs since the CRT is fine (as also evidenced by you looking closely, when you can see pixels due to ambient light being reflected out of the panel)

---

How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc