New member here so please forgive me if I'm posting to the wrong area or make any mistakes. I'm on my 5th day of trying to fix my PC. I work from home so I've missed several days of work so far. I need to be up and running for work tomorrow.
A friend sent me here, calling this the best forum for real troubleshooting advice. He told me to be as detailed as possible so here it goes.
Thursday morning my PC crashed and after rebooting all I got was black screen. I reset several times, powering off the PSU, removing the AC cable. After a point when depressing the power button on the front panel it would shut-off, but immediately restart itself, both when the power button was released and while it was still being held.
I had had an issue with the most recent Radeon driver update, Adrenalin 18.7 I got a screen error and crash which killed the update installation twice so I decided to put it off. I couldn't see anything to navigate an update though, but I figured the issue was GPU related so I switched to my MOBO HDMI. It took some more resets but I eventually got my login screen. Not sure if this is relevant, I have an old monitor I used to test as well, for some reason the old monitor shows the BIOS boot up but my new monitor does not. While reseting trying to get the image back the old monitor was more successful in getting an image.
Through various combinations of old monitor/new monitor, resets, GPU, and MOBO I eventually got an image while plugged it the GPU and new monitor. My friend suggested I run DDU on the GPU. I rebooted into safe mode, ran DDU and wiped the GPU, but I was never able to get and image while plugged into the GPU again. I tried to install the new GPU driver while plugged into the MOBO but I kept getting "unsupported AMD device."
For some reason I decided to crack open my case and reseat my GPU, but while doing this I stupidly shorted my MOBO. I spent the next three days just trying to get my PC to post. I will spare you that saga except to say that I learned the hard way that no, not all 1151 sockets are the same, Intel didn't make 8th gen boards backwards compatible. Anyway, I had to buy a new, compatible MOBO, but my PC did eventually post.
But now I am back to square one. All booted up I still have a black screen. After everything I had tried and been through for some reason I finally decided try a different HDMI cable. Voilá. I got an image, only from the MOBO though. It couldn't have been that easy, I couldn't have been that stupid could I? I may have been that stupid, but i wasn't that lucky. A restart proved quickly the answer wasn't that easy and the fix wasn't stable. Back to black screen. I gave up last night, but this morning it booted and I got an image and I went back to trouble shooting on my main PC.
Hardware, software, malware, I've investigated every avenue I can think of, but ti's impossible since many of the require restarts and I go back to black screen.
The last thing I was trying was looking in Device Manager, my AMD GPU wasn't even showing up. "Other Devices" however was lit up with warnings for Base System Device, PCI Memory controller, and two others. I download Intel Driver and Support Assistant which shows me I'm completely missing a driver for the onboard graphics, which certainly seemed like it could be a fix to my problem, at least the next step. I download the Intel Graphics Driver for Windows 10. As I start the install I get a BSOD with a Memory Management error and now I'm back to black screen once again.
Additional info:
1. Worried it was malware I ran rkill and and Malware Bytes with Scan for Rootkits turned on. Both showed nothing.
2. Although I get black screen when booting I can guess about when it should have reached the log-in screen. I can hit enter, type my password, hit enter again, and the number lock key lights up. I can also hit Windows Key + X, then U, U to shut down. So best guess for me is I'm booted and logged in (eliminating that as a possibility), I just can't see anything. (For some reason the numbers lock key is now lighting up before I try to log-in now though.
3. Last, I have SCP ToolKit installed, a driver so I can use my PS3 Dual shock. When I boot it makes a loud launch sound before I see my log-in screen. This was annoying until it became the only tool I had to signal that I had booted. Today it seems to work only intermittently, sounding sometimes, silent other times.
I feel fairly certain that first problem I need to solve is installing drivers for the onboard graphics and then I can go from there, but right now it's been black screen on boot for ~2 hours. Getting an image seems to happen randomly. I want to start fixing things, but don't know how to fix what I can't see.
A friend sent me here, calling this the best forum for real troubleshooting advice. He told me to be as detailed as possible so here it goes.
Thursday morning my PC crashed and after rebooting all I got was black screen. I reset several times, powering off the PSU, removing the AC cable. After a point when depressing the power button on the front panel it would shut-off, but immediately restart itself, both when the power button was released and while it was still being held.
I had had an issue with the most recent Radeon driver update, Adrenalin 18.7 I got a screen error and crash which killed the update installation twice so I decided to put it off. I couldn't see anything to navigate an update though, but I figured the issue was GPU related so I switched to my MOBO HDMI. It took some more resets but I eventually got my login screen. Not sure if this is relevant, I have an old monitor I used to test as well, for some reason the old monitor shows the BIOS boot up but my new monitor does not. While reseting trying to get the image back the old monitor was more successful in getting an image.
Through various combinations of old monitor/new monitor, resets, GPU, and MOBO I eventually got an image while plugged it the GPU and new monitor. My friend suggested I run DDU on the GPU. I rebooted into safe mode, ran DDU and wiped the GPU, but I was never able to get and image while plugged into the GPU again. I tried to install the new GPU driver while plugged into the MOBO but I kept getting "unsupported AMD device."
For some reason I decided to crack open my case and reseat my GPU, but while doing this I stupidly shorted my MOBO. I spent the next three days just trying to get my PC to post. I will spare you that saga except to say that I learned the hard way that no, not all 1151 sockets are the same, Intel didn't make 8th gen boards backwards compatible. Anyway, I had to buy a new, compatible MOBO, but my PC did eventually post.
But now I am back to square one. All booted up I still have a black screen. After everything I had tried and been through for some reason I finally decided try a different HDMI cable. Voilá. I got an image, only from the MOBO though. It couldn't have been that easy, I couldn't have been that stupid could I? I may have been that stupid, but i wasn't that lucky. A restart proved quickly the answer wasn't that easy and the fix wasn't stable. Back to black screen. I gave up last night, but this morning it booted and I got an image and I went back to trouble shooting on my main PC.
Hardware, software, malware, I've investigated every avenue I can think of, but ti's impossible since many of the require restarts and I go back to black screen.
The last thing I was trying was looking in Device Manager, my AMD GPU wasn't even showing up. "Other Devices" however was lit up with warnings for Base System Device, PCI Memory controller, and two others. I download Intel Driver and Support Assistant which shows me I'm completely missing a driver for the onboard graphics, which certainly seemed like it could be a fix to my problem, at least the next step. I download the Intel Graphics Driver for Windows 10. As I start the install I get a BSOD with a Memory Management error and now I'm back to black screen once again.
Additional info:
1. Worried it was malware I ran rkill and and Malware Bytes with Scan for Rootkits turned on. Both showed nothing.
2. Although I get black screen when booting I can guess about when it should have reached the log-in screen. I can hit enter, type my password, hit enter again, and the number lock key lights up. I can also hit Windows Key + X, then U, U to shut down. So best guess for me is I'm booted and logged in (eliminating that as a possibility), I just can't see anything. (For some reason the numbers lock key is now lighting up before I try to log-in now though.
3. Last, I have SCP ToolKit installed, a driver so I can use my PS3 Dual shock. When I boot it makes a loud launch sound before I see my log-in screen. This was annoying until it became the only tool I had to signal that I had booted. Today it seems to work only intermittently, sounding sometimes, silent other times.
I feel fairly certain that first problem I need to solve is installing drivers for the onboard graphics and then I can go from there, but right now it's been black screen on boot for ~2 hours. Getting an image seems to happen randomly. I want to start fixing things, but don't know how to fix what I can't see.
