Black Screen on boot after installing 31.0.101.4824 Windows 11

[tfp]

Upon upgrading to the latest driver Arc driver 31.0.101.4824 on my Acer Predator BiFrost A770 Windows 11 fails to display the desktop.  The screen is black upon reboot after a clean driver install.  The mouse is visible and will move with the movement of the mouse.  Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to try to get the task manager to open has no impact.

Booting Windows into safe mode I am able to reinstall the last beta driver 31.0.101.4676 and windows will boot successfully.

Are there any work arounds to the Black screen issue outside of installing older driver?

[tfp]

I have tried using DDU before installing the driver. 

I have tried both HDMI and DP with no luck as well. 

[tbnguyen1407]

I got same issue with A770 on NUC 12. Had to revert to older driver.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tbnguyen1407

Is you GPU and Acer Brifost as well? Or what is the model you have?

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tbnguyen1407]

I am using stock A770 on NUC Serpent Canyon.

I just tried newer version 4826, the result is even worse with the display completely undetected after driver uninstallation finished.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tbnguyen1407

Could you share with us your system specs through the Intel® System Support Utility?

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tfp

Thank you for posting on the Intel® ARC™ Graphics Communities. We know experiencing a black screen after installing your driver can be worrisome, we are glad to assist you and help you find a solution.

I see you have tried some of the most important troubleshooting steps to try to narrow down the problem and since the issue does not occur with the older driver this might be a driver problem, however, I would like to check your system specs for possible issues, updates, and compatibility problems. Please share with us a log file from the Intel® System Support Utility.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

I have attached the SSU logs with the current driver, 31.0.101.4676.

Some other details.

I am currently running 3, 4k screens.  The main screen is a Gigabyte M28U running at 144hz.  The second screen is a Dell S2721QS at 60hz.  The third screen is an LG 27UD58P-B at 60hz.  All screen are connected over DisplayPort.  I have tried with all screens attached and just the Gigabyte screen attached.  I have also tried the Gigabyte screen with a HDMI cable.

In one of my different tempts to run the driver install I enabled my iGPU on the 8600k and put that as the main display and while the screen driven by the A770 was black I was able to see windows on the iGPU.  In this screen I uninstalled the A770 driver and as soon as it was removed the screen turned back on.

I have run DDU against Nvidia drivers, AMD drivers, and Intel drivers just in case.

Please let me know if there is anything else to try out.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tfp

Have you had the chance to test our most recent driver 31.0.101.4826? Please check if the same issue still happens on that driver and based on the SSU file you shared with us I would advise you to test a stable version of Windows since from what I see you are on Build 25951 from the Insider Preview program, it would be good to test the stable build 22621 to make sure Windows is not causing the issue.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

The new 31.0.101.4826 ended up with a black screen as well.  I just choose the clean install instead of running DDU first this time around.  I can try that later but I'm not expecting any change.

Getting off of the Insider build will require me to do a clean install of windows.  If possible I would like to avoid that outcome.  That build works fine with 31.0.101.4676 so while it's possible there is a conflict between the new version of windows and the latest Intel Drivers, the older 4676 drivers work.

Are there any other logs I can pull with the 4826 driver installed that would be helpful?

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tfp

Please let us know once you have been able to perform the clean installation of the driver using DDU, I understand you did the regular clean installation from the installer but with would be better to use DDU in this case.

Once the driver has been tested, we will need to investigate this issue with our team, and check if there might be a limitation form the OS side or something else going on.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

I tried uninstalling with DDU from safe mode.  Rebooting and installing 4826 and no improvement.  The display is black with only a mouse pointer visible.  Installing 4676 resolves the issue.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tfp

Thank you for letting us know. allow me to check this issue and the information provided so far with our team and I will get back to you once I have an update.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

Sounds good, thanks!

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

I was looking around under c:\Intel\FWUpdateService and noticed for all of the 4824 and 4826 install attempts the log is about 5 times the update size vs when I downgrade to 4676.  The different looks to be not being able to update the card firmware vs an intentional skip on 4676.

I have a few of these logs from my different update and downgrade attempts since I got the card in August.  Please let me know if there are other logs out there that could be helpful.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tfp

Thank you for sharing these log files. In order to ensure the firmware gets updated, please try to update to the latest version 31.0.101.4826 using only one monitor through an HDMI connection. After the update create a log file using the Intel Graphics Command Center (Intel GCC) so we can verify the firmware installed.

We reviewed this issue with our team and tested the latest driver in a different system but we did not see any similar issue, due to this, if the issue continues after trying the above steps, we highly recommend getting out of the Insider version of Windows and installing the latest stable Build 22621 so we can make sure the OS is not causing any type of conflict with the driver.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

Please have the firmware team look at this again.  I expect the issue is that it will not update the firmware version because of this item that is also in the files I attached in the post above.  The hardware is matched but the firmware is not compatible.

[FwData_Update_Parsing]:File Path : C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\iigd_dch_d.inf_amd64_6716fdeedff684d0\\FWDATA\dg2_acer_predator-bifrost-a770_config-data.bin
File Type : 5
File Version : major_version->101-> oem_manuf_data_version->2-> major_vcn->1
[2023/9/25--20:53:58:936] : The image's 4-ID manifest extenstion matched with the device
[2023/9/25--20:53:58:937] : [FwData_Update_Parsing]:firmware data version is not compatible with the installed one (OEM version)

When reading the GPU bios version with GPU-z the version that comes up was release in 101.4644.  Acer has not release an updated version of the Arc driver on their website and their driver version is from March timeframe.  It seems like one of the Intel drivers I installed in the past updated the firmware version (the version that caused the fan oscillations between 0 and ~30% fan speeds and now the latest installing is detecting a firmware version compatibility issue. 

How can I flash the latest firmware in away that the basic driver install stops skipping the Acer Predator Bifront A770 firmware version.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tfp

The firmware update to version 1064 was first introduced with driver 4644 and should be compatible with most graphics cards including the Acer Predator version, even though the firmware did cause an issue with the fans in Ace Predator GPUs, this was later fixed in a recent driver update, so there should not be an issue in updating the firmware through the driver installer, Were you able to try updating to the latest version as advised in our previous post, using only one monitor through an HDMI connection?

We can certainly go ahead and take a further look at the logs files you share, however, we would like to ask for the Intel Graphics Command Center (Intel GCC) report so we can confirm the firmware version currently installed on your GPU as well can you please confirm if you were able to test this on the stable Windows version.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

I did try upgrading last night with just 1 monitor over HDMI and it did not make a difference.  I'll look at pulling the Intel GCC report.

I'll see if I can get another version of Windows installed, might take me some time to get that done.  Likely I'll try to get something setup for dual boot, haven't needed to do that in a long while.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello tfp

I wanted to check if you had the chance to reinstall the Operating System on your PC or if you were able to test in a dual boot configuration. In case you are still experiencing a black screen when booting your system, please send us the log from IGCC so we can check your GPU firmware version.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[tfp]

Hi Hugo,

I was able to setup Windows 10 as a second OS.  When installing 101.4826 it did update the firmware based on the output in the install details.  I tried installing 101.4885 on Windows 10 and that worked as well.  I'm not sure where the log files are for IGCC but I installed the app from the MSFT store and I have attached an image of the GPU info.

No luck on 25967.rs_prerelease.230929-1123 for the latest 101.4885 drivers.  There seems to be a conflict between something in the recent Pre-release Win11 builds and the 101.48XX Intel drivers.