Question Only monitor not primary monitor

[Naomeister]

I'm stuck using an old phone to type so have to make this short.

I have a single monitor setup. Some time ago, an old monitor broke so I replaced it. However, it left a ghost monitor I couldn't get rid of as Monitor 1 and added the new monitor as Monitor 2. For a while I just ignored it and used monitor 2 as my primary. This worked fine in Windows after booting, though my monitor was never detected during boot. Instead, a "generic non-pnp monitor" was used during boot that was a ghost monitor, using the microsoft display driver.

However today, I wanted to fix it so I tried troubleshooting and tried connecting my monitor to a different cable slot. Now, even after moving the cable back, it seems my monitor is no longer detected even in Windows and so I have no display. I can't see my desktop to switch it back manually, and my monitor is still undetected during boot. Any ideas how to fix this so I can at least see Windows again?

 

[Naomeister]

A quick update: I found an old VGA cable instead of my HDMI cable and plugged that in as well to see if I could make things work, and it seems that it is successfully detecting my monitor with the VGA cable.

However, the weird thing was that the VGA cable was then detected as a third display (Monitor 3), while the HDMI cable was still detected as the second display (Monitor 2) even though they're both plugged into the same monitor and the same GPU. If I plugged both cables in at the same time, I had access to both Monitor 2 and Monitor 3, even though Monitor 2 seems to still be using the HDMI cable perfectly fine. However, if I unplugged the VGA cable, neither display worked and my monitor had no signal again. This happened when I unplugged the VGA cable even if I'd set Monitor 2 (the HDMI cable) to either be my primary display, or my only display.

Through some random finagling, I managed to find a set of settings that worked to restore it back to how it was before I started troubleshooting:
Duplicating the desktop from Monitor 1 [Ghost Monitor, which is still my primary, for some stupid reason], onto Monitor 2 [HDMI cable], and then disabling Monitor 3 [VGA cable] before finally unplugging the VGA cable.

So the original issue still remains, but I at least have my display back.