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memtest86+ 1.70 and disc check. Mint logo looks normal.

Mint 10 live CD won't boot in normal mode. Hard lockup with a black screen after GUI starts to load. Boot-up options have no effect on the point of lockup. The backlight remains off but half the LCD keeps cycling on&off;, horizontally split.
In failsafe mode it only boots to CLI. boot options like vga=773, vga=791, xforcevesa don't help either. startx reports an error along the lines of
(EE) VESA: kernel modesetting driver in use, refusing to load
(EE) No devices detected
Fatal server error: no screens found
....
xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error

gdm command also gives an error:
(gdm-binary:2347): WARNING **: Failed to acquire org.gnome.DisplayManager: Connection ":1.24" is not allowed to own the service "org.gnome.DisplayManager" due to security policies in the configuration file
Could not acquire name; bailing out

Latitude x200 is analogous with Gateway 200STM. Chipset is Intel 830m with integrated VGA. LCD has a mercury open/close switch. From my experience so far (Mint5 +, LMDE, Ubuntu 8.04+, Debian 5 & 6) the Debian-derived distros have major problems with mercury switches and are poorly suited for notebooks.