Do you have another monitor? If you do, you can try hooking it up and see if you get any kind of a signal to it straight off. You can also try hooking it up to your TV, which should get a signal right away if you flick through the laptop's display button.
If you have a friend with a laptop, you can try taking the HDD out and putting yours into his and see what happens.
If worst comes to worst, you can run to a good computer store and see if they have an adapter for a laptop hard-drive to connect it to a PC (assuming you have a PC sitting around).
Although I hate to admit it, I've had this problem before and I was on a trip for work. Don't tell anyone, but I took the HDD out, drove to a Circuit-City, waited till sales people were away from the laptops, found a model similar to my work laptop, and swapped the drives like a card-shark. I then ported the critical documents and Power-Point pres to my thumb drive, then promptly ripped the drive back out, threw in the store's original one, and walked away without seeing if the laptop recovered from the brutal heart transplant!
LOL
Hey, I got what I needed. Tough beans to CC for not gluing their display HDD cases closed! LOL
