Suddenly my Windows machine has no signal for the monitor. I turn it on, the fans spin, the CD drive tests for a disc, and the physical drives spin, but at no point does the screen show anything at all. No BIOS, no Windows logo, no errors. Monitor shows its own "no signal" message throughout.
Custom-built Windows 10 machine with EVGA GTX 1080 connected via HDMI to a large monitor. Mobo is ASRock Z97 Extreme4. Machine is ~7 years old, this configuration is 2 years old, but I haven't used the machine at all for the past ~month. No installs, no configuration changes, no updates, nothing.
Things I have tried with zero result:
- swapping HDMI cables (both cables work)
- swapping monitors (both monitors work)
- using different output ports on the PC
- using different input ports on the monitor
- physically removing the video card and using onboard video instead
- resetting CMOS by removing battery (after, I replaced it with a new battery)
- mashing F1, F2, and F8 (separately) at boot to enter safe mode
- force-reset 3x to trigger recovery mode
There are no scenarios in which I can get a video signal, so I cannot boot into safe mode or recovery mode to mess with drivers or video settings. I can only do things that require no visuals. So, maybe pressing F8 loaded the safe mode prompt, but I wouldn't know it, and I'm not pushing "Enter" when I can't see what's on the screen.
I'm at a loss for troubleshooting this. Everything on the net assumes a person either gets a display signal until BIOS loads, or that hard-resetting several times will load the recovery environment. I don't get either. At no point in the process does either monitor even flicker.
I do think it's booting into some kind of recovery mode, because this mobo has a little "Dr Debug" LED that eventually settles on code "F2", which this page suggests is an undocumented code indicating some kind of recovery process. But I wouldn't know, because there is zero video signal.
Any help is appreciated.
