[solved] No video output outside of basic VGA mode (UEFI config, windows safe mode) after BSOD

[akb95]

I recently assembled a new computer (specs below), I booted into a windows boot stick just fine (made with windows media creation tool + rufus) and installed everything - standard stuff.

After that I proceeded to install drivers, starting with the gpu driver naturally - about 30 minutes after this I got a BSoD of type kernel_security_check_failure. Fine, that's strange but whatever - I reboot and start installing some more applications (steam, discord etc), I get another BSoD of type page_fault_in_nonpaged_area, that implies memory related to me so I boot into memtest86+ (version 7.5), I let it run through 8 passes and I get nothing so I figure it's probably not a RAM issue and boot back into windows, I get the UEFI prompts as expected (del to enter settings F11 for boot menu etc) and get the windows load icon - but at the point where it would normally switch from VGA mode to actual graphics we instead get [no signal] on the screen.

Fine, I force it into safe mode (power off, power on, power off during windows loading followed by windows diagnosing why it couldn't start and giving me the option for advanced settings->enable safe mode).

In safe mode I uninstall the nvidia driver with DDU and reinstall it, then I reboot - fairly normal stuff.
Still nothing.

So I force it back into safe mode, uninstall the driver with DDU and boot back into windows and am again greeted with nothing.


At this point I start to suspect maybe the windows install was damaged by the BSoD so I reinstall, not like I'll lose anything on a clean install anyway - I go through the windows installer, and it goes swimmingly until we reach the Cortana screen, here we again get [no signal] and I'm at a loss for action.

At this point it seems like my GPU just died, next thing I'm going to try is to see if I can get anything out of it with a linux live environment (after I've gotten the finalizing steps of the windows installer to work in safe mode) - that should clarify if it's actually the GPU or not... I hope it's not the GPU.

EDIT: second runthrough got us to the cortana screen, I'm not sure how long this will last though.

Additional troubleshooting steps are requested and appreciated (and in the hopeful event where it all works this time any theories or methods to figure out what happened would be helpful)

Specs:
CPU: Ryzen 7 2700
Motherboard: MSI x470 GAMING PRO CARBON
RAM: G.SKill Ripjaws V 2666MHz (Red) 24GB (one stick's in the HTPC, not running all 4 shouldn't be an issue, true?)
GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X (Twin Frozr/Zero Frozr VI fans - yes, I removed the sticker)
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 750W (the entire system shouldn't really be drawing more than ~475-500W, so this should have plenty headroom)




UPDATE: I reinstalled windows and I've got some more data:
1) let it install the gpu driver via windows update (this is unavoidable since it happens near-instantly and I need to pull the nvidia driver and DDU while we're at it)
2) disable networking (unplug ethernet or disable driver)
3) nuke gpu driver with ddu if windows had time to install it
4) install nvidia driver, minus GeForce Expereience - check clean install checkbox
5) reboot right after.

This yielded basic VGA mode with no networking (because still disabled), the 1070 shows a warning symbol in device manager and when I check properties it has the following text:

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for the drivers required for this device. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source. (Code 52)

I'm not entirely certain what this implies, is my SSD bad? Is my GPU bad? Is windows being naughty?

I don't think my install medium is bad, 4 new computers and only one is doing it - this rather implies a machine specific problem, true?

 

[pete_101]

Probably a stupid question, but did you install the motherboard drivers? I always leave the GPU drivers till the end after I have all the other drivers up and running.

 

[akb95]

I did not install them myself, no - windows auto installed them though.

I'll try that next for sake of completion though, although this is starting to behave like a memory issue more and more (New BSoD CRITICAL_STRUCTURE_CORRUPTION, let's run the windows memory debugger and see if it finds something memtest86+ didn't) - the only thing that makes that feel like an iffy tree to bark up is that it'll remain perfectly stable for hours on end in windows safe mode and in linux live environments (in fact both of those clock in at about 80 and 40 hours respectively, various system management stuff like backup management etc)

Outside of safe mode I can barely manage an hour before a BSoD (in fact for this run I didn't even last long enough for an sfc /scannow to complete so I guess I'll have to force it into safe mode to do that again, after the scheduled memory test finishes that is)

Considering that it doesn't really feel like a memory error, but it behaves like one... what else behaves like a memory error? Driver errors probably. Oh yeah I should check the SMART self-report on the SSD too to check that from the list of causes.


When you say 'the motherboard drivers' I assume you're referring to chipset drivers, I'm not planning on installing the PIDE/SATA RAID driver (since I'm not using RAID) and I don't think the onboard audio driver would be quite this catastrophic (ditto for the network drivers) and that's all MSI offers as drivers go (chipset, onboard LAN, onboard audio, RAID).

I suppose I should do a mobo BIOS update if one's available, I'll have to check what version's on my board right now - that's helped with stability before (exactly ONCE before, 15 years ago but nonetheless it's helped before, at other times I've only ever needed to to enable features (e.g cpu support) or to enhance features present)

UPDATE: OK thus far losing video output seems to correlate to BSoDs, i.e after a BSoD (in this case without even the nvidia driver loaded) it will fail to get video outside of safe mode.

Very peculiar, leaning towards RAM or SSD issue possibly? Or some very hard to debug GPU issue still.

 

[akb95]

The apparently problem was twofold, one my motherboard really doesn't like running these sticks in a configuration of 3 (a lot of boards don't mind, it'll just run one stick in single channel mode - this one did, but only after running memtest for over 16 hours).

The second problem was the 4xx series drivers, downgrading to 399.24 solved my issues with not getting any output on displayport on boot or after monitor wakes from sleep (a cursory search for "nvidia 414.36 displayport {multi/dual/triple}-monitor {no video/screen will not wake}" returns relevant results of other users with similar issues)

I'm going to call this solved after about a week of running stable