HI, i installed Fedora 5 on my laptop yesterday (got rid of windows completely, not dual booting) and it went okay, everything seemed to be working (except didnt manage to get my wireless notebook card or pen drive working but thats just driver/mounting issues i guess), but since I shut down when I boot up theres no signal to my monitor at all, it just stays blank. It sounds like its starting up normally (fans start going etc) but it just isnt recognising the monitor or something. I could really do with some help with this as I like to use my laptop regularly at college. If you need any particular specs just say and i think i can find them.

when I had issues I put the install disc back in and used the repair setup
the console window has lots of guides to repair kernel and or boot commands

Ive tried booting with the install disc in, but again the problem is that nothing comes up on the screen, and as this is the first time ive used linux theres no way i could attempt to repair it 'blind', thanks for the suggestion anyway, it'd be helpful if someone could tell me exactly what I have to do at what stages so maybe I could format it or something without the monitor working, then just reinstall and hope for the best.

Your issue could be related to a bad cache in the RAM. Easily fixed- pull out your battery and put it back in, then reboot. Either that or the monitor config file isn't right. That you might be able to address through using an external LCD temporarily to make changes.

Hope this helps!

without disc in does it boot to bios
if not that is diff issue
I don't know how to reset cmos on laptop

the battery-replace trick did it, thanks for your help, tis greatly appreciated