Display won't turn on even though my Macbook Pro detects the display

Question

I've had a long running issue with this but now rather than intermittantly, it just won't work at all. I have a 17" Mackbook Pro running Lion and an older style aluminium 23-24" cinema display (the boxy one). The problem also exited under snow leopard. I used to arrive home, pull my MBP out of my bag, place it on a stand, plug the power, USB for my keyboard and mouse and display cable (inculing the USB and firewire) and hit the keyboard and my display turned on and off I went. But now when I try to do that, I get the light on the display flash once and then the display appears to be dead. I'll go into detect displays and it's there and detected but I can't for the life of me figure out why I get no response from my monitor other than one flash from the little power light. Anyone know how I can fix this? Is there a fix or is it a hardware problem? I've zapped the PRAM and done an SMC reset. No dice.

Answer 1

This is a long-standing problem we've all been waiting on a fix from.  I was rooting for the EFI update this morning to fix it, but no love.
I have a MBP 15" early 2011, with a 27" Cinema Display (the last pre-Thunderbolt one)... and periodically, when returning from somewhere and plugging the Mac back in, it acts like it's seeing the monitor, but just doesn't display.
I've found, after a year of this, that the following all helps:
1) leaving nothing else plugged in while first plugging in the display.  Don't hook up the power or USB, don't have anything plugged into the USB hub on the back of the monitor, or it won't ever detect.
2) Just keep trying... leave the MBP open, plug in the display port and nothing else... if the big monitor doesn't turn on, but the MBP display flips to "I'm an extra display" mode, unplug, wait for it to go back to "MBP is solo display" mode, then repeat... eventually, for me at least, the big monitor will turn on for real, then I can close the MBP and all is well.
This is sucky, but it does eventually get the 27" to show something. 
The other symptoms are all the same... when it's doing this, the computer thinks it's displaying to the 27", USB and power are being sent to the MBP just fine, audio's working... just nothing is actually on the display.
Oh, and for me, it also does it sometimes when the 27" goes to sleep, so I have the syspref set to "never sleep"... it goes black from the screen saver, but never turns off, 'cause then it's iffy if it'll come back on.
I'd LOVE for them to eventually fix this... it's something in either the MBP firmware, the monitor firmware, or just something wrong with one or the other that isn't fixable... but it'd be nice to know.
In the meantime, I rarely use my MBP as anything other than a desktop nowadays, so I leave it plugged in, don't let the monitor sleep, and all is well.