I recently bought a lightly used gaming PC from a friend's defunct cafe and I'm struggling to boot into any operating system. Here are the specs: MSI B550A Pro motherboard, Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Kingston Beast DDR4 RAM, and an Asus RTX 4060ti graphics card. I don't have any installed storage yet, as I'm planning to use Linux. I've got several SSDs, one of which has Linux Mint that worked fine on my old PC. I also have a thumb drive with Ventoy and multiple distros like Ubuntu and Pop!_OS.
The issue is that the PC successfully goes through POST, and I can get into BIOS. However, when I try to boot from the SSD with Mint or any other OS via the Ventoy flash drive, I get no display. I've already disabled secure boot since I learned that the Nvidia card needs special drivers. I've checked all the cable connections for the GPU and display, and they're fine, as I can see the BIOS. Whenever I connect a storage device, I lose display, and I can't access BIOS anymore by pressing delete. I'm at my wit's end trying to figure out what's going wrong. Any help would be appreciated!
3 Answers
Sounds like it could be an issue with how the MSI motherboard is handling UEFI/Legacy boot with Ventoy. I recommend trying to clear the BIOS as a first step. If that doesn’t work, see if you can update the BIOS once you can access it with a USB drive connected. As for OS, CachyOS might be a good candidate as it comes with built-in Nvidia drivers, so maybe give that a try if you can get everything stable first!
You might want to check if the CMOS battery needs replacing, as a dead battery can cause issues like this. If that's not the problem and all your cables are properly connected, consider updating the BIOS. Just a heads up though, that's a sensitive operation, so you might want to be careful with that. Also, have you checked the BIOS date? If it's pretty old, an update could help.
I checked the BIOS date and it's correct. I was thinking about resetting the CMOS, but it’s hard to access under the graphics card. I can update the BIOS fairly easily, but I’d prefer to avoid it if possible since I don't have a working PC to download the update.
Make sure your monitor is connected to the Nvidia card and not the onboard graphics. Double-check that it's set to display port settings too; sometimes that can cause issues. Also, what’s your monitor model?
The monitor is an ASUS TUF Gaming VG27A and it's definitely plugged into the display port on the GPU.
I was actually leaning towards CachyOS because of compatibility. The problem is I don’t have a PC to download anything or create an installer right now; I'm pretty much stuck borrowing a friend's computer.