Black screen after gpu issues and driver install.

[Cole Morgan]

I was trying to play dark souls 3 earlier and was getting a framerate of around 0.5-0.25 frames per second. After checking around I found, in device manager, that my gpus had been disabled by the system (I do not know why). So in an attempt to fix the issue I tried to update the drivers from device manager.

They downloaded, but during install my screens went black. I let it sit for about an hour, as I know flickering isn't uncommon with gpu updates.

Eventually restarted my system. Upon restart I see the uefI bios splash, and can enter the bios, but get a black screen before login with a visible cursor. I know I can still log in as I have done it and heard notifications.

I have tried to access safe mode with shift+f8, but am unable to, it just jumps back to the bios on any boot selection. I have tried the win+p for monitor switching. I cannot shift+restart to enter safe mode as I cannot see any buttons. And I don't have any external media to boot from as I used an online upgrade from win8.1.

Anybody have any ideas on where to go from this? Every troubleshooting guide I've read involves either being able to see the screen or enter safe mode through commands before boot. Neither of which I can access.

System:
Asus X99 Strix Mobo
Intel i7 6800k
Corsair lpx ddr4 3200
Seagate hdd
Samsung ssd
Evga 1300w psu
Sapphire r9 295x2 X2

Thanks in advance! No clue how to proceed.

 

[RekoHart]

Any on-board gpu you can plug into?

 

[Cole Morgan]

As in integrated graphics? None to speak of, no video output on the motherboard at all.

 

[Uniquey]

What happens if you try removing one of the graphics cards? And try swapping them?

You should get boot options from F8, otherwise you've got a problem with your Windows partition. I've seen similar issues to this from computers that have been upgraded to Windows 10 from previous versions. Never upgrade using Windows method, always do a clean install.

Download Windows Media Creation tool here; https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

Use this to try and repair the operating system.

Best regards,


Uniquey

 

[Cole Morgan]

Okay, I have fixed the issue, but connot say for sure what it was that did the trick.

Initially I reattempted the boot to safe mode, Shift+F8 entered me into a boot menu. From there Esc followed with F8 allowed me to again pick another boot device. This got me to a blank screen with the spinning loading dots.

After this got me nowhere I powered down and unseated my card in the primary pciex16 slot and attempted to use only the card in the x8 slot. And to my surprise, my login screen! I then attempted to use the secondary card in the primary slot, but that put me back to the same loading screen. Then my primary card in the secondary slot worked. Then placing the secondary card in the primary allowed mt to boot up with the login screen, but it flickered for a while.

After a manual driver update I was able to stop the flickering but the OS was unable to recognize the native resolution of my monitor. after a bit of tweaking in the display settings and AMD settings I tried a restart. That allowed the OS to recognize the native resolution.

tl;dr: I have no idea what was wrong or what it was that fixed it, thank you to Uniquey for the swap suggestion.