Macbook Pro screen damaged but have secondary monitor

So I dropped my MBP and the screen is now unreadable, powered, but unreadable in the slightest. Although I can see a bit of cursor activity when mousing over to is.

While this sucks, I have a secondary monitor that I can work and do work with 90% of the time. Herein lies the problem; I need to boot to the install CD (pressing 'C' to get there upon boot, yadda yadda) but I cannot see what is on the screen and therefore cannot choose an option. What I'm attempting to do is use disk utility off the CD to repair my drive which cannot be done while in the OS it's self as the 'repair disk' function is grayed out. Verifying disk shows no problems.

I'd like to figure out how to blindly navigate to disk tools (a very, very difficult process, nae impossible to me) or hopefully shift the boot screen display to the secondary monitor so I can navigate by sight. Is there such a way to perform that, or in lieu of that have disk tools automatically run upon boot to fix my problematic drive?

Please help, my Mac god(ess) friends!

-Terry C. Wilcox

System

15" MBP 2.4 intel core 2 duo, 2GB RAM, standard running 10.5.5 with all public updates. The drive is standard 150GB Fujitsu MHW216

Hi there and welcome,

I'll state the obvious first...presumably you have tried booting with the external monitor. Is video mirroring enabled?

If it isn't, then try plug in the external monitor, turn on the MacBook and whilst it's booting shut the lid, the MacBook should then realise and make the external monitor the default one...once it's up you can then open the lid and turn Video mirroring on.

If this doesn't work try booting the the Mac with the external monitor attached and then when it has booted hit command + f1 or command +f2 that used to work on older Laptops.

regards

Ric

Very good to hear from you, Ric. And I greatly appreciate your welcome.

To clarify, I can get the system to boot to a desktop (autologin) the real problem is trying to install, say, Windows through boot camp or, more importantly being able to run disk utility to repair the main drive - seeing as how that drive needs to be unmounted. It's like I'm flying blind.

I have booted with the external monitor. And even with mirroring enabled there are no options/menus/buttons on the external monitor - just the default background image.

When I mirror and boot up then close the lid the system goes to sleep, and thus the secondary external monitor doesn't work when asleep, obviously. I hear similar problems lately in the mac community as well about folks wanting to close their lids w/o having the machine automatically go to sleep.

I've tried blindly "grabbing" at the sections of the dead display (when mirroring is NOT enabled) and attempting to drag the menu and bring it over to the good external monitor side - to no avail.

This is a good start, Ric. Your timely reply and friendly advice is much appreciated in this stressful situation.

Best regards,

Terry