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Any time, mate. Sorry I couldn't be more use but I'm glad your friend could help you out.
I wrote my dissertation this year, and bought an external HD specifically for doing backups of all my data...

Sorry mate, all out of ideas - short of removing the HD, but as you pointed out that invalidates the warranty. What you really need is something like Norton Ghost, or a partition imager, but you need...

Would you try one more thing?
Connect an external monitor and boot from a Live CD, not your HDD.
If that doesn't work, then I'm afraid it's "I got nothin'" territory - time to hope someone smarter...

This is probably the really obvious question to ask, but... have you tested that it's the graphics card and not the screen? There should be an external monitor socket on your laptop - frankly,...