Whoops. I posted my response before I realized that you had specified that your screen was completely blank. That may not be a drive problem, but a screen problem.
I certainly don’t know the relative failure rate of motherboards vs. screen connections, but one of my compaq (curently owned by HP) laptops just had a screen failure that turned out to be a broken wire to the screen. The wire broke right at the hinge of the laptop, presumably due to fatigue from many opening / closing cycles. You may have the same problem; if you do, the way to fix it is to expose the wiring from the laptop to the screen, making sure to expose the wires at the hinge of the laptop, and look for a broken or burned out wire.
He needs to make sure he hits the LCD, Monitor Button.
Could be he just turned off his screen.
If the screen goes blank as soon as he goes through system check at startup, that is likely the problem.