[Solved] - Tower's 1st [no, 3rd] Hard-Reset since clean-reinstall.

[kdemeoz]

Thanks AJ

Once i looked at your attached pic i definitely recognised "my" BIOS, but i cannot at this stage remember whether all its settings are still at "Default", or whether the vendor [or i] had changed any of them back in the distant past. I shall boot into BIOS & look into this tomorrow. However...

...<<Rocky, pls don't take offence, i am not doubting you or contradicting you, but instead am trying to make sense of all this mass of bewildering info>> ... AJ, in an earlier post Rocky had said:

you have Intel Haswell i7-4790, which has an Intel integrated HD 4600 GPU, which is more powerful than the Nvidia GT 610

Therefore if that is correct, AND if it is "bad" that all this time both GPUs have been enabled (is that bad? does that lead to crashes/freezes?], then shouldn't i disable the "weaker" GPU? If correct (is it?), then that would imply that the Nvidia card should be disabled [or removed, as Rocky had also previously suggested], rather than disabling the Intel GPU. Am i understanding that properly? 

I am not a gamer btw, so any loss of 3D acceleration from a gaming perspective would be irrelevant to me... but would it hurt other aspects of my computing experience, unrelated to games?


EDIT:  Haha, this time Rocky, in our latest instance of simultaneous replies, you beat me to post first!!  :-) 

[AJSlye]

I don't pretend to know everything, or to assume what is best for someone else. I was only giving the quickest and easiest solution.
Yes, the Intel part may be the better option for some and not for others. If you would rather use the Intel chip, then you could always remove the nvidia card from the system. There is no way to actually disable an add on card like you can the one built into the cpu, it would have to be physically removed.

[rocky7x]

Hi AJSly,

Thanks for confirming my assumption. I think kdemeoz has 2 options now that all is investigated:
1. stay with Nvidia card a switch to Nouveau driver, since the experience is better with it according to kdemeoz
2. or remove the Nvidia card physically from the tower and use the Intel GPU

From the perspective of crashes, I think the only option is #2, though the hwe kernel may prove me wrong...

[kdemeoz]

I don't pretend to know everything, or to assume what is best for someone else. I was only giving the quickest and easiest solution.
Yes, the Intel part may be the better option for some and not for others. If you would rather use the Intel chip, then you could always remove the nvidia card from the system. There is no way to actually disable an add on card like you can the one built into the cpu, it would have to be physically removed.

Thanks very much AJ     

Thanks also for the PDF earlier; that's much more convenient for reference [except during actual BIOS-editing, of course] than the tiny-tiny-font paper manual that came with the pc. 

[kdemeoz]

Hi AJSly,

Thanks for confirming my assumption. I think kdemeoz has 2 options now that all is investigated:
1. stay with Nvidia card a switch to Nouveau driver, since the experience is better with it according to kdemeoz
2. or remove the Nvidia card physically from the tower and use the Intel GPU

From the perspective of crashes, I think the only option is #2, though the hwe kernel may prove me wrong...

Hi & thanks Rocky

I sense "we're"/i'm now rapidly approaching the end of the road wrt solution-options. It would be nice if this coincided with an actual lasting solution...

This morn was the 2nd Resume after the night's Suspend status, since the 24Feb "xserver-xorg-hwe-16.04" upgrade. Again Tower awoke correctly, no freeze at login screen, no freeze during the subsequent hours of operation to now [but yes an unsurprising repeat of the Nvidia driver pixelation faults [Cairo-Dock, desktop icons] & KWin "graphics reset occurred" warning messages during various standard KWin Desktop Effects]. 

Based on this thread's history, & the latest corro, here's my latest plan, in this sequence:

1. Retain Nvidia GPU & driver, until earliest of (a) next freeze, (b) i can no longer stand the daily pixelations & KWin errors, [c)  two weeks elapses.

2. Retain Nvidia GPU but change to Nouveau driver, until earliest of (a) next freeze, (b) one month elapses & i'm satisfied with both system reliability & graphics performance [in which case this becomes my "permanent" arrangement, & empirical proof that the solution was the HWE upgrade].

<<only if more freezes occurred with #1 & #2, OR, if i come to feel dissatisfied with the graphics performance of my "weak" Nvidia GPU:>>  

3. Remove the Nvidia GPU physically from the tower and use the integrated Intel GPU [but in this scenario, what driver should i select in Maui's Settings - Driver Manager? (or maybe then it might not even offer any choice?)].
 

[AJSlye]

For option 3, the system should default to the xorg intel driver. You shouldn't need to do anything.

[kdemeoz]

For option 3, the system should default to the xorg intel driver. You shouldn't need to do anything.

Cool, thanks.

I like to play "guess the other person's timezone" with myself, & have noticed over a period a particular daily "range" in which i see your responses. It's my 18:10 Sun, is it perchance your 23:10 Sat, or 08:10 Sun? 'Ish?

[kdemeoz]

Oh what a horrible afternoon & evening. Tower is now dead again, with some symptoms similar to those i've previously documented, but mostly with a brand new way of screwing up. This post is written from Lappy.

During a particularly intensive session with 2 VMs running & one of them attempting a sudo backup operation writing to a destination on my HDD, via a backup pgm i only recently discovered & was testing, Clementine suddenly stopped working. Fearing this might be another one of the freezes beginning, i began closing one by one all my running pgms, preparatory to attempting an orderly reboot [the fact i could actually do all this indicated that this was a different problem; not a freeze]. By the time i had closed most stuff, Maui would not then respond to my desktop-initiated Restart click; at this point it did stop responding to me. I was however able to REISUB.

After the new boot & login, with reference to The Plan i recently listed a few posts ago, i decided i might now launch Driver Manager & change from Nvidia to Nouveau driver. I did so, then rebooted. This is where the new faulty behaviour began. All looked fine til the 1st splashscreen, which itself looked normal but it stayed on screen for longer than normal, then the screen went black except for a blinking cursor. Subsequent reboots gave the same result. Groan.

I changed to tty, edited grub with nano to use nomodeset [knowing this was wrong but short of other ideas], saved updated & rebooted. I was not surprised to find this now caused Tower to hang at the 2nd splashscreen [repeatable]. I re-edited grub to remove that change, saved updated & rebooted, but predictably this only returned to the black screen after 1st splashscreen.

In tty i issued the prime select nvidia command to see what would happen, but it said that command was not known... huh?

Thinking now that my attempt earlier to change from Nvidia to Nouveau had borked all the graphics settings, i decided [in tty] to purge all the nvidia stuff then reinstall it:

Code:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-378

The purge was fine, but i was shocked, totally shocked, at the response to the installation attempt. Half a wall of text appeared, proposing to remove multiple lines of files that seemed unrelated entirely to nvidia, & telling me it was also going to install a vast array of new files [many many lines of this]. Buried amongst this was my desired nvidia stuff, but it was swamped by myriad other files... some of the names implied it was trying to install Ubuntu Gnome!!  I took some pics with my phone camera, & will post them later if i can upload to Lappy. I did not proceed with the installation. HOW can i make it install ONLY the nvidia stuff, & nothing else?

As if things weren't already bad enough, now it got much worse. I made another stupid decision. Wondering if maybe somehow the nvidia gt610 gpu card had actually failed, but still hoping to avoid having to pull the Tower out from under my desk & take it apart to remove the card, I decided to try booting into BIOS & changing from the default to the integrated intel gpu as the first screen [& i only have one screen], then rebooting. What an idiot. Now, there is no signal at all to my monitor! I can no longer even boot back into BIOS to return that setting to default, because the screen simply receives no signal. Oh my goodness.

Supposing now i had no remaining option but dismantle Tower & remove the nvidia card, in desperate hope that BIOS would then be kind to me, i now have Tower sitting beside me with its side off. I simply cannot deduce HOW to remove the damn card. Once i post this ... post... [before i forget important stuff that's happened, to report here], i'm going to continue trying to understand how to remove it. I removed the/a screw seeming to hold the end of the card to the Tower chassis rear, & i can prise the front of the card out of its socket, but the rear of it stubbornly stays in the socket, fouled i fear by the end metal bracket that screws to the chassis. It seems to need much force, but i'm terrified of breaking something. Grrr.

I might be be wrong but even if i can somehow remove this card, i'm unsure i can run the Tower that way, as the HDMI socket for the monitor's HDMI cable seems to be part of this card's metal end-bracket. --> oh, wait, there seems to be another HDMI socket higher up the chassis rear panel, so maybe that one connects to the integrated Intel gpu...?

This is pretty unpleasant.

[leszek]

I can no longer even boot back into BIOS to return that setting to default, because the screen simply receives no signal. Oh my goodness.

Don't forget to put the hdmi/dvi cable to the other card (the internal one) if you switch to using the internal onboard Intel instead of the dedicated pci express nvidia one

oh, wait, there seems to be another HDMI socket higher up the chassis rear panel, so maybe that one connects to the integrated Intel gpu...?

Exactly that's your Intel cards output there

[kdemeoz]

I can no longer even boot back into BIOS to return that setting to default, because the screen simply receives no signal. Oh my goodness.

Don't forget to put the hdmi/dvi cable to the other card (the internal one) if you switch to using the internal onboard Intel instead of the dedicated pci express nvidia one

Thanks... writing this still from Lappy not Tower  :-( 

Managed finally to remove the nvidia card, boxed up the case again, reconnected all the rear cables, & yes i did this time connect the monitor's HDMI cable to the only other remaining HDMI port [so logically that must be for the Intel, i presume]. Then i booted...

Groan, still black screen.

However, i have now rebooted it at least a dozen times, each time trying a number of key combinations to try to get back into BIOS [bearing in mind that as i cannot see anything, i'm going by memory]. Still have not succeeded. I have however, somehow, two times, generated a normal-looking Maui 1st splashscreen, but once again it leads to a black screen. I have from here though been able to tty, in which i ran inxi -Fxz, which of course now only shows a single gpu [Intel], BUT... for driver, says "FAILED: nouveau". Why is it doing that? Why is it not using the Intel driver? How do i fix this pls?