- May 11, 2013
- 14
- 0
- 18,510
Okay, I'll try to condense this story down to just the important details. First off, my specs:
CPU: Intel i7-6700K
MoBo: MSI Z170A SLI
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP 4x4GB @ 2666 MHz
GPU: ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2070 8GB GDDR6
PSU: Corsair RMi Series RM850i 850W 80 PLUS GOLD PSU
Boot Drive: Samsung 850 PRO 256GB SATA III NAND SSD
I also have 3 WD Mechanical drives, but this issue occurs even when they are not plugged in.
I have 3 displays. A BenQ 4K 60Hz Display, an Acer 1080 144Hz display, and a 1080 Huion screen tablet (drawing tablet. This issue happened when I had all 3 plugged in, and also when I had only the BenQ and Acer displays plugged in.
So about a week ago I reinstalled Final Fantasy 14 to play it with some friends. I'd played it in the past (in 2019) and never had any issues with it. However, this time, within a few minutes of playing, my displays all became color distorted, and a white "checkerboard" like pattern covered all my displays and my computer turned off on it's own. At the time I was playing the game on the BenQ monitor.
When the PC powered back on, it went into Windows automatic repair and seemed to fix itself.
I tried the game again, this time playing on the Acer monitor. The same issue occurred again, but this time, windows wasn't able to repair itself. I tried over and over to get it to boot, but it was to no avail. I ended up having to perform a system restore just to get the PC to start up.
Fast forward to today. I'd updated all my drivers, got the most recent windows updates, completely wiped and reinstalled FFXIV, and manually set a system restore point. But I'd been putting off playing it out of fear.
I tried it again today, and surprise, surprise, it happened again. This time, it was much, much worse. I managed to get into the Windows repair environment, and I tried every option it gave, from automatic repair to trying to uninstall recent updates, to "resetting" the PC.
When I tried to do the recent update uninstall, it told me there was an error that made doing so impossible. It told me the same thing when I tried to "Reset" the PC. As for System restoring, for some reason it told me my c: drive didn't have drive protection enabled, despite the restore point I'd set being right there in the list. Since I couldn't get into windows, I had no way to enable system protection, so I did some research and found that I could do it from the cmd in the repair environment.
Well, I tried it, and when I tried to do the system restore, the drive letter for the drive that it wanted to restore was the d: drive, not the c: drive. I did not have any other drive but the c: drive plugged in. And yes, it showed both the c: and d: drives in the list of restorable drives, but the c: drive, which is the boot drive and the drive I'd made the restore point for, was unable to be selected.
So I decided to try to reinstall windows and letting it put all my old files in a "windows old" folder. So I made boot media and started a reinstall onto the c: drive.
It was going well, until during the middle of the Windows set up the screen went black for a long time and my peripherals seemed to be disconnected as their lights ceased shining. So I restarted the PC and after it turned on, I got the blue windows logo and then the same black screen. No matter how many times I restarted, this persisted.
I eventually caved and decided I would let windows format the drive and do a totally fresh install as I figured an old or corrupt system file might be what was causing the issue.
So I did did a new install, formatted the SSD, and did a fresh install. Once again, I got to the windows set up point and the screen all of a sudden went black. I restarted the PC and went into the BIOS for no particular reason, and after staying there for a while fretting over the fact that my system is seemingly bricked, I exited the BIOS and let the PC restart. THIS time, it actually restarted and I was able to get through the windows set up and get into a windows environment.
I plugged in my ethernet cable and went to go download the drivers for my GPU. I got as far as starting the Nvidia driver install, and in the middle of that, it black screened again. I figured/hoped it was just the result of the drivers setting themselves up, but nope, it was a permanent black screen. So I had to restart again.
And now here we are. Restarting the system just takes me to a black screen and I can do nothing. I only have my boot drive plugged in.
UPDATE:
I reset the CMOS by removing the MoBo battery for a short time to revert the BIOS to default settings. It had no effect on the issue and upon restart I still just get a black screen and the lights on my peripherals (which light up when I power the system on) turn off and I'm left with a black screen and non-functioning peripherals.
ANY advice or help would be tremendously appreciated. This is an inexplicable issue for me. I have never experienced anything like this before.
CPU: Intel i7-6700K
MoBo: MSI Z170A SLI
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP 4x4GB @ 2666 MHz
GPU: ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2070 8GB GDDR6
PSU: Corsair RMi Series RM850i 850W 80 PLUS GOLD PSU
Boot Drive: Samsung 850 PRO 256GB SATA III NAND SSD
I also have 3 WD Mechanical drives, but this issue occurs even when they are not plugged in.
I have 3 displays. A BenQ 4K 60Hz Display, an Acer 1080 144Hz display, and a 1080 Huion screen tablet (drawing tablet. This issue happened when I had all 3 plugged in, and also when I had only the BenQ and Acer displays plugged in.
So about a week ago I reinstalled Final Fantasy 14 to play it with some friends. I'd played it in the past (in 2019) and never had any issues with it. However, this time, within a few minutes of playing, my displays all became color distorted, and a white "checkerboard" like pattern covered all my displays and my computer turned off on it's own. At the time I was playing the game on the BenQ monitor.
When the PC powered back on, it went into Windows automatic repair and seemed to fix itself.
I tried the game again, this time playing on the Acer monitor. The same issue occurred again, but this time, windows wasn't able to repair itself. I tried over and over to get it to boot, but it was to no avail. I ended up having to perform a system restore just to get the PC to start up.
Fast forward to today. I'd updated all my drivers, got the most recent windows updates, completely wiped and reinstalled FFXIV, and manually set a system restore point. But I'd been putting off playing it out of fear.
I tried it again today, and surprise, surprise, it happened again. This time, it was much, much worse. I managed to get into the Windows repair environment, and I tried every option it gave, from automatic repair to trying to uninstall recent updates, to "resetting" the PC.
When I tried to do the recent update uninstall, it told me there was an error that made doing so impossible. It told me the same thing when I tried to "Reset" the PC. As for System restoring, for some reason it told me my c: drive didn't have drive protection enabled, despite the restore point I'd set being right there in the list. Since I couldn't get into windows, I had no way to enable system protection, so I did some research and found that I could do it from the cmd in the repair environment.
Well, I tried it, and when I tried to do the system restore, the drive letter for the drive that it wanted to restore was the d: drive, not the c: drive. I did not have any other drive but the c: drive plugged in. And yes, it showed both the c: and d: drives in the list of restorable drives, but the c: drive, which is the boot drive and the drive I'd made the restore point for, was unable to be selected.
So I decided to try to reinstall windows and letting it put all my old files in a "windows old" folder. So I made boot media and started a reinstall onto the c: drive.
It was going well, until during the middle of the Windows set up the screen went black for a long time and my peripherals seemed to be disconnected as their lights ceased shining. So I restarted the PC and after it turned on, I got the blue windows logo and then the same black screen. No matter how many times I restarted, this persisted.
I eventually caved and decided I would let windows format the drive and do a totally fresh install as I figured an old or corrupt system file might be what was causing the issue.
So I did did a new install, formatted the SSD, and did a fresh install. Once again, I got to the windows set up point and the screen all of a sudden went black. I restarted the PC and went into the BIOS for no particular reason, and after staying there for a while fretting over the fact that my system is seemingly bricked, I exited the BIOS and let the PC restart. THIS time, it actually restarted and I was able to get through the windows set up and get into a windows environment.
I plugged in my ethernet cable and went to go download the drivers for my GPU. I got as far as starting the Nvidia driver install, and in the middle of that, it black screened again. I figured/hoped it was just the result of the drivers setting themselves up, but nope, it was a permanent black screen. So I had to restart again.
And now here we are. Restarting the system just takes me to a black screen and I can do nothing. I only have my boot drive plugged in.
UPDATE:
I reset the CMOS by removing the MoBo battery for a short time to revert the BIOS to default settings. It had no effect on the issue and upon restart I still just get a black screen and the lights on my peripherals (which light up when I power the system on) turn off and I'm left with a black screen and non-functioning peripherals.
ANY advice or help would be tremendously appreciated. This is an inexplicable issue for me. I have never experienced anything like this before.
Last edited:
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