Attempting to boost NVidia's speed on Arch resulted in a boot failure.
Attempting to boost NVidia's speed on Arch resulted in a boot failure.
Specs: Asus TUF X570 Plus WiFi MOBO
AMD Ryzen 7 5800x
NVidia GTX1080 (latest drivers)
Monitor connected via display port
Latest standard kernel
I'm in over my head. Bottom line is, I was taking some of the steps listed on the "Improving Performance" and "Gaming" pages on the Arch Wiki, and it led to my system being unable to boot, or even present me with my BIOS, even with all drives disconnected. The main changes I made were (in this order, or at least as best as I can remember):
Installed Gamescope
Added nvidia, nvidia_drm to the modules section in mkinitcpio.conf (and ran mkinitcpio -P afterwards
Added nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to grub.cfg (after GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT), and ran "sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg"
In my MOBO's UEFI settings menu, enabled resizable BAR.
The last step is where I noticed a change. When I saved the setting and rebooted, I got a black screen. Usually I would get an Asus TUF logo, then my GRUB boot screen, then my SDDM login screen. After this, my monitor would seemingly lose signal until it eventually showed up at my login screen. After this, my OS worked normally.
However, due to a number of other issues, I decided I'd just cut my losses and reinstall to start fresh and hopefully make less mistakes. (I'm only 3 days into this install so I have barely anything on my system). I plugged in my install thumb drive, rebooted, held down F2 which is what should bring me to my UEFI menu, nothing. Let go, waited for a minute, nothing. No SDDM this time either. Tried again, same thing. Said screw it, powered down and unplugged my rig, unplugged all my drives, plugged the computer back in, turned it on, still nothing.
I literally cannot think of anything else I can do. Unfortunately I can't verify if my GPU is somehow bricked because my CPU doesn't have integrated graphics (if it's worth anything, the GPUs fan is working normally, so it's getting power). My MOBO isn't throwing any codes via it's built in LEDs, so I don't think it's borked.
(EDIT: Double checked, I'm getting a solid white light that corresponds to a VGA error. I was mistaken and for some reason thought the white LED was for Boot).
I don't have access to another GPU (reaching out to a friend who may be able to loan me one for a day), so I'm kind of in a jam. Is there anything I can try before I take it to a repair shop to have it properly diagnosed?
Sure, I'll give it a shot after work today. Appreciate it, not very familiar with hardware problems like this.
I tried a few different approaches to fix the issue. First, I unplugged and reinserted the RAM sticks, then moved the GPU into a different PCIe slot before turning it back on. Nothing happened. I repeated the steps with swapped RAM sticks, but still got no response. Then I switched to using HDMI instead of Display Port, which finally worked—my system booted into BIOS and displayed properly. It seems this might be related to MOBO problems. I checked my monitors and confirmed HDMI was functional, though none of the DP outputs on my card were working. I’m surprised since my cards’ HDMI ports seem fine, but it could point to a firmware issue on the card itself or a faulty cable. Without other devices with DP outputs, I can’t test the cable further, but I might try some others this weekend. Thanks for the advice—it really helped, even though I usually handle software problems more easily. I’m glad my system is back, though I still have some doubts about why the DP isn’t working.
Well, everything seems to be working now after the reset. I restored my drives, created a partition, and installed Windows 10. After downloading the NVidias firmware updater and applying the update, I regained DP functionality, though it only appeared during login. I checked the BIOS version and found it was outdated too. I updated it, turned off fast boot, and now I can see my BIOS through a Display Port. A big win since I was about to list my GPU for sale!
Lesson learned: Keep updating your firmware regularly.
It's odd indeed. This seems to be either an error from my side during adjustments that led to a firmware/BIOS problem, or a very coincidental timing of a bug that was inevitable. Either way, I hope this serves as a warning, and I'm sure others share my oversight regarding those updates.