I ran into a situation where my Lenovo T410 shows just a blank screen, even without a mouse cursor. I've documented the issue in this question. I think that the issue, most probably, is caused by the NVidia driver. All my attempts to boot the system with anything displayed on both the laptop's LCD as well as on an external display failed.
Is there a way to replace the NVidia driver with a standard VGA driver using the System Recovery Console? This is the only boot option that works in my case.