Inspiron 6000, won't display on external monitor in bios start-up

I have an old 5 years+ Dell Inspiron 6000, running XP. The display died several months ago--I recall the screen briefly flickered erratically a few times in the weeks before this happened. I am not sure if it's the backlight or the inverter, but even when I shine a flashlight on the screen in a dark room, there is absolutely nothing there.

Regardless, since then I've been using a spare external monitor to display the laptop screen rather than dish out the cost of shop diagnoses and part(s) replacement. Everything works fine (the laptop screen displays normally on the external monitor, etc.) except one thing:

The external monitor will only display in windows (normal and safe mode). It will not display the bios start-up screen (and so I cannot not navigate bios settings), and when using a command-line utility like chkdsk, for instance, the external monitor will also not display. The keys for toggling different display modes for this laptop is FN+F8, and it only works in windows. I've hit the keys countless times pre-"windows start-up logo" screen and when my laptop is running chkdsk, but it just doesn't work outside of windows.

This is really bothering me. Any ideas?

 

What if you disconnect the internal LCD connector? It's right under the keyboard/button cover area.

 

Well, first thing is first, you should probably replace your screen, you can get an unused screen + inverter combo for roughly in the range of $90 to $110 depending on the resolution you want.

$90.00: WXGA = 1280x800
WXGA+ = 1440x900
$98.50: WSXGA+ = 1680x1050
$110.00: WUXGA = 1920x1200

I wasn't able to find a true WXGA+ screen, but they have compatible screens from Chinese developers. But truthfully, for $20 more dollars, you might actually make off better with the WUXGA Screen/Inverter Combo which is not a "compatible" screen but a replacement screen, so it's guaranteed to fit. Could you also post the specs of your laptop, such as what kind of processor, graphics, memory, hdd do you have? To figure out as to why it's not working on your external display.