screen goes blank at startup 11.10

[bldgengineer]

Everything was fine until today. The screen just goes blank as if there's no power to it or it goes to sleep after seeing the text output at the beginning. Sometimes the screen will come back just long enough to see Ubuntu starting a check disk but then it goes blank again and I see the hdd light stop blinking. The caps lock and num lock key still work according to the lights. Its like it thinks the lid is closed.

Anybody have any ideas? I'm a complete noob and just started getting back into linux so please be patient :(

Edit: it's an Aspire 6920 if that helps