Chosen Solution

My MacBook got a small impact, and since then the screen has not been working.

  1. The chime/sound plays, but the Apple logo does not appear and the screen remains black.
  2. When I plug in an external monitor using HDMI the Apple logo and login screen appears, but when I log in, it freezes during load.
  3. When it freezes during load, the actual screen on the MB Pro lights up (lit up black, as opposed to before which was just nothing).
  4. Booting in safe mode, I was able to get past login screen and in to OS X on the external monitor.
  5. Booting in recovery mode, I was able to re-install El Capitan (using external monitor), but it does not improve. Probably a cable inside has just gone loose, right? I just bought a screwdriver set to open it, but I am not sure what to look for, or where to look. Any advise? Thanks in advance. Images:

What happens when you plug in an external monitor? Are you able to see the desktop and your files? Update (10/26/2015) OK, so we know the system is functional. What likely happened here is the hard drive was in the middle of a write function and was not able to complete it. So the master boot blocks are corrupted. Do you have an external bootable drive to see what happens when you boot up under it? You’ll need to run Disk Utility from the external drive to fix this.

Look for any cable that appears to be connected to, or should be connected to, the display. To me and my limited experience it sounds like either your monitor’s cable was severed or just pulled out a port. Open it up and look around for anything that doesn’t look as it should; that’s really the only valuable advice I can give you.