Hello, I am in a state where my laptop boots to a complete black screen, and I don't know how to get out of it.
What I did
I bought this laptop last week, it has a GTX 4060 and Ryzen CPU
I create a 512gb partition in Windows, and installed Zorin 17 on it.
I disabled secure boot from the BIOS, as it prevented me to boot Zorin
I upgraded Zorin to 17.2 within ZorinOS
I switched the display driver from Wayland to X11
While trying to enable brightness control on the screen, I modified GRUB this way: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset acpi_backlight=vendor"
I installed NVidia drivers 550 with the tag "Proprietary, tested" from the "Install Additional driver" tab, still trying to enable brightness controls
After I rebooted, GRUB does not pop up anymore, I only have a complete blackscreen and seemingly can't do anything.
What I tried
Rebooting, and waiting ~30min
Plugging the laptop with a monitor with a HDMI cable
Booting while holding F2 (it used to bring me to the BIOS, now it does nothing)
Booting while holding various keys (Escape, F10, F11, F12, Enter)
Botting with the USB key I used to install Zorin
I am unsure of what to try next, I can't start recovery mode or even boot Windows anymore. Does someone have an idea of what I should try to get out of this situation?
So the way I see it, the two most likely culprits are these two options here:
Trying to find the exact reason is the fun part , but we can try to boot into the live USB that you created to attempt to do a few things.
I also see that you're HOLDING a button to get into the BIOS. Usually you need to hit the key at a certain point in the boot sequence to get into it. So rather than hold any of those keys, I usually constantly spam the button in question (say F2 for example) until the bios screen turns on (or whatever screen you're hoping for shows up).
Try that and I would try removing the GRUB line you put in first from the live USB (if that works to get you there) then reboot again and see if that's the main issue. I always find backlight control to be fiddly at the best of times.
Thank you! And thanks for the reply, that ended up working!
For whoever has a similar problem in the future:
I closed the lid, and unplugged the laptop after pressing the power button. I think what I was doing yesterday was merely putting it in sleep mode, but this ensured it rebooted.
I spam pressed Escape while booting, instead of holding it, and grub appeared.
Zorin 6.8 was still hanging on boot, but I had the 6.5 installation that I installed with the USB key that worked, and was not using the NVIDIA drivers. I booted that one, and executed:
About the screen brightness, is it not changeable with Zorin? I tried a bunch of solutions already, none worked, and that last one made me lose a few hours. I'm wondering if it's a lost cause a this point.
The nvidia drivers and the current nvidia drivers have been a fun pain for a while now, but I thought 550 version was good with 6.8, but maybe not in your case? Or maybe it is and you the other updates needed to complete to then allow them to be used? In any case, glad your system is functional now .
You could try another version of the drivers and see if they work, and if not just follow what you've already done in order to get a functional system working again. It might be worth trying 550 again but remove the GRUB line you added which may have been causing some issues. But I'm not an nVidia user, so maybe someone else here can give some tips when it comes to that fun.
, but we can try to boot into the live USB that you created to attempt to do a few things.