Help Atrix HD Screen Failure

[shalemail]

Well my HD freaked out last night. Doing the strangest things.
At dinner, the phone would not wake up, or so I thought. In reality the screen would not light up. I can get it to occasionally light up but then it almost immediately goes dark. Now I of course tried a hard restart (virtual battery pull) ... no help, tried just turning it off and back on ... no help. (Hard to do with a screen that will not stay on reliably let me tell you) But during this process I realized that the phone itself, and the touch screen, still function fine when the screen is dark??? So I went home, hooked it up via HDMI to the TV and again, it functions correctly but the screen is still iffy on being lit up, but I can still scroll through the screens using the TV to see where I am going. CRAZY. But it gets better. This morning I put it in the car dock, just to see what it would do, an the screen works fine in the car dock???

Any ideas from what few of us are left using this phone? I did call AT&T last night and since it's under warranty they are sending me a refurb, but if I can get this one back from the dead I'd much prefer that. Any hope or is this a serious affliction?

Thanks all.

 

[Frisco]

Have you tried cleaning the area at the top of the screen where the proximity sensor is?

 

[shalemail]

Have you tried cleaning the area at the top of the screen where the proximity sensor is?

I am one of the very OCD bunch that regularly cleans my screen, and yes I did actually try some "tests" with regard to the proximity sensor. It may indeed be the problem, but noting I do from outside the phone effects it. (It does strike me as something possibly to do with the proximity sensor though)

 

[bmucitelli]

I know that this is months after the event, but this EXACT thing just happened to me. Did you ever find out what happened?

 

[drsdrs14]

I've just now discovered the same problem. Any suggestions are more than welcome. The phone is perfectly functional with the exception of the screen sporadically blacking out. At times it seems that applying pressure in certain locations can help it stay lit but I'm having trouble repeating this success or causing the blackout through my own actions.

I will be dissecting my phone presently and possibly moving anything that looks like a circuit board to a replacement phone to see what happens. Before doing that I'll try cleaning the Proximity Sensor.

 

[drsdrs14]

I realize that this isn't all that helpful, but I managed to fix the problem on my phone.

I had another identical phone at hand as a backup and decided to transfer the main vector board (the green thing) from my broken phone to the new phone. There are some great videos on youtube for this which cover replacing the screen and/or digitizer of the phone in the event of a crack.

After the lengthy operation in which I felt like Dr. Frankenstein, I discovered that both my new phone with the old chip and the old phone with the new chip worked perfectly fine. I can't really say why, but I'm guessing that opening the phone up and wiping it down as best as you can and making sure everything has been tightened and is in the right place is a good start for fixing it.

Best of luck!

P.S. I changed phone bodies in large part because my screen on the old phone looked like a spider web.