First-gen Macbook Pro - screen not working, how to get external screen working?

Hi, rallydarkstrike…quite the sticky situation you have. I’d suggest you start off with the basics.. reset smc/pmu. Then zap pram 3-4 times on startup.. how to do that can be found here: https://www.howtogeek.com/312086/how-and-when-to-reset-the-smc-on-your-mac/

and for the pram zap( aka nvram reset) , here:

https://www.macworld.com/article/224955/how-to-reset-a-macs-nvram-pram-and-smc.html

if you had( or could borrow) a 2nd mac laptop from,say, 2012-ish, you could try Target Disk Mode between ‘em, and thus get the data off the 1st generation Macbook pro.. you can find out about that here: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlp1443/mac. I’d suggest changing the pram (cmos) battery but you may need a soldering iron for that.. as a last resort, the hard drive is removeable, requiring a Torx T-6 screwdriver, etc. The drive itself is sata-2… so you , if you wanted to go that way, would need a sata-2 to usb 2.0 adapter that’s Mac compatible.. just rambling now… good luck to you

john b

Command + F1 I believe used to toggle Display Mirroring on & off.

Sometimes an Apple laptop can have trouble sending video to the external display so you can try using Clamshell Mode by connecting a USB keyboard & mouse and closing the display.

As long as Filevault is not enabled Linux should be able to access the drive assuming the hard drive is healthy. In theory Linux should be able to mount a Filevault 2 volume, but I've never been able to do so although I never really had time to figure it out. I'm not sure about Filevault 1.

Edit: Linux will only mount the volume read-only if it is a journaled volume. Also for some volumes it may require entering an offset value when mounting. I know the offset is required for some Apple volumes, but I forget when this became required (probably when Apple started using Containers instead of partitions).