Uninstalled on-board graphics driver. Laptop will not display at all.

The laptop I am dealing with is a lenovo y50:

• Intel Core i7-4710HQ
• 16.0GB PC3-12800 DDR3L SDRAM 1600 MHz
• 512 GB SSD
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M 4GB Graphics Card
• Windows 8.1

A few days ago I booted up my laptop to a blank screen.  By "blank" I mean that the laptop lcd was not on at all.  I was able to get the laptop to display on my TV via hdmi.  I looked at the device manager and the laptop lcd that is usually listed as "generic pnp monitor" was not there.  When I went into the display settings, the laptop would only detect the TV screen.  I then uninstalled the driver for the on-board graphics chip because I (wrongly?) thought the driver would reinstall on a reboot.  Right when I uninstalled the driver the signal to the TV dropped and the laptop would not display on any other external monitors (even after a reboot).  I took my laptop in to a repair shop.  They could not get the laptop to display on an external monitor, and told me they could not fix it. 

What bothers me is that I know the computer is working other than not being able to display anything.  I know this because when I returned from the shop I turned on my computer, logged in with my password, and plugged in a drive I use for automatic backup of certain folders.  When I checked the drive on another computer, sure enough the folders were up-to-date with files that had not been backed up previously.

I would love to hear any suggestions on how to proceed, bearing in mind I cannot display anything from the laptop.

Thank you.

Not trying to sound simple but my guess is a burnt graphics card. One cannot "see" BIOS?

As a lenovo fan-boy (of sorts) and other dedicated graphics laptops; these things can get extremely hot if proper air-flow is not provided. When playing on an ASUS with almost the sames specs, I remove the bottom casing and place it on a cheap dual-fan heat extractor and temps top out at 80-81*C: I was hitting in the high nineties prior.

Hoping it is not the dreaded reflow deal... that would s***.

Maybe someone can sort this thing out for ya.

Following and will jump back in if anything else come to mind (feeble ).

Drivers have nothing to do with display pre-windows. If you can't even see BIOS options the video card is probably toast.

Did the repair shop check to see if the problem was the back light or inverter?

Thanks for the replies.  The shop did not specifically mention the back light or inverter.  I was assuming that there are 2 problems: 1) The laptop lcd screen is done and 2) whatever is preventing the laptop from displaying to an external monitor.  I guess my confusion about a hardware problem causing #2 comes from the fact that it was displaying fine on an external monitor right up until I hit uninstall for the on-board graphics driver. 

Even if you uninstalled the graphics driver Windows should still have a Windows driver which would work.  The quality may not be the same, but it should work.  My guess would be that the card has failed.  The good news is that the NIVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M is a dedicated card, not a integrated IC.  This means that you can replace the card.  If this had been a integrated IC you would have had to replace the motherboard to replace the graphics chip.

... you can replace the card.

It's all BGA in his/her rig (even CPU).

Problem is the onboard HD4600 graphics should kick in but maybe one can reset the BIOS to defauls with key-press-combo and something may happen? Doubt it but worth a shot....

Edited by bludgard, 14 September 2016 - 11:24 AM.