Diagnosing a Black Screen Issue with my ThinkPad T440p #ThinkPad #Battery #Shorts

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Transcript

So recently, when I started up my T440p, it gave me the LUKS encryption prompt as usual, took me through the GRUB menu, and the screen went blank as soon as it was about to boot into Void Linux. I tried Nobara from the mSATA drive, and it went to a black screen as well, right before booting into the graphical environment. Closing and opening the lid did bring up the screen for about a second, taking it back to black again. The machine worked well on the BIOS screen.

Now, nothing had been changed for a while on this machine. No hardware changes, no kernel upgrades, and I don’t even remember the last time I booted into Nobara. Could it be the FHD IPS screen failing, could it be the display cable getting loose, could it be the Nvidia chip causing a total motherboard failure? Thankfully, I did figure it out, and you wouldn’t have guessed the cause of the issue either.

Something suddenly reminded me of this aftermarket battery failing to charge just a day before and connecting the machine to the charger made it work as normal again! So, the moral of the story is that aftermarket batteries can cause more issues than you think they can.