I have a laptop whose screen stopped working after being in sleep mode. It worked on an external monitor via display port but I made the mistake of switching to the microsoft basic display adapter while trying to fix the issue. It now doesn't work on the external monitor either...

I have tried a hard reset with the battery out, reseating the RAM, reset the bios and CMOS. I can access the shared drives on the laptop so have recovered docs, etc but there is no remote control set up so can't do anything else. It does have a VGA port but i don't have a cable so haven't been able to test that yet. 

I am happy to remove the HDD, format it and then try to reinstall windows from USB or something like that but if there are more options to try I'd like to. It could also just be that the screen is poked I guess lol.

Any ideas?