I know this is going to be quite a lot to read but it'll save anyone who is willing to help, asking some of the questions that would be natural to ask. I wanted to make sure I'd covered everything I'd done so as to minimize me saying 'yes I've tried that' to everybody's natural suggestions. So please please be patient and read this for me. I'm really at a loss right now and quite disheartened.
So I've been tearing my hair out for the 3rd day running with this problem.
A little backstory to help understand what's going on. For a couple of years now I've had my PC connected to my SONY Bravia HD ready LCD TV. A couple of rare instances in the past I've lost the display for unknown reasons but always managed to get it back, oddly, what seemed to work each time is stripping out my pc and leaving just the fans, cpu, psu and motherboard connected, even took out the bios memory disc (you know that little silver coin looking thing?). Dunno why all of that worked it just did.
I left my PC on to download (harmless download and not a windows update) and it was FINE. I went to walk my dog, came back about an hour or less later and found myself staring at a blank black screen on my TV. I moved the mouse, hit the keyboard start menu key, nothing. Checked the connection ends, nothing.
So I had no choice but to hard shutdown and power up again. Nothing.
Eventually, after again stripping out my PC (including BIOS memory) and putting it back together I managed to get my display back via vga cable to my 19" Dell Monitor.
Since then I've been trying EVERYTHING I can think of to get the display back on my SONY TV.
These are all the things I've tried.
- Tested different HD cables on my Sky+ HD. ALL fine.
- Hooked up vga to monitor and hdmi to TV. I get one of THREE things. 1. Nothing on TV and full display on Monitor OR 2. Nothing on TV and nothing on Monitor except a blank desktop wallpaper. All icons, taskbar EVERYTHING else gone, just a wallpaper. Cant see mouse movement either and no key functions bring any windows up. OR 3. Nothing on TV and display on Monitor changed to letterbox with all icons, taskbar etc showing and operable. Mouse movement visible, keyboard commands all working and displaying on screen.
- Tried updating my graphics card driver. Uninstalled drive properly and wiped wiped clean using driver sweeper. Installed newer drivers even though the previous driver was fairly new and worked perfectly fine before.
- Tried another HD LCD TV with ONLY HDMI cable attatched. Shows POST, Boot up and windows loading screen but then blank screen once loading screen disappears and just before the desktop should appear the TV displays 'NO signal' and asll I hear is the chimes to say windows has loaded.
-Tried using nVidia control panel. right-clicked desktop, clicked nvidia control panel, clicked on 'setup mulitple displays', clicked on 'my display is not shown'. At this point you see two options stacked on top of each other in a popup window. the top one is the 'Rigourous display option'. The bottom one is 'force television detection'. THIS bottom feature is completely ghosted out, including the checkbox that says next to it 'force television detection on startup'.
So I clicked the top option button that says 'rigourous display detection', it find nothing and then asks 'Would you like the television connection enabled?'. I clicked yes to that and the checkbox becomes ticked but ALL of the bottom option STILL remain ghosted out. After clicking ok the popup closes, I went back into it and saw the exact same thing I saw when I first clicked on it. force detection feature ghosted out completely and check box UNCHECKED again.
unforntunately this may well be because I didn't actually have the HDMI lead plugged into the PC end, duh? why not? well because of the problem mentioned before. When I plug the HDMI end into the PC again, I lose my whole display on my monitor (no icons, taskbar etc.) except for the wallpaper which is still showing, completely blank and so I can't do anything in windows.
At ONE point, I did manage to get a FULL working display on my monitor with a vga/dvi cable WHILST the hdmi lead was connected from PC to TV.
I went into the display settings and sure enough it was showing two displays listed. 1 was 'Dell1907FP' the other was 'SONY TV'. So I KNOW there's nothing wrong with the HD slot on the graphics card (Gainward nVidia geForce 260 GTX) and I know there's nothing wrong with the HD slot on the TV because the same slot works just fine with my sky+ hd box AND my PS3.
Unfortunately the other two slots don't work but that's irrelevant because as I said I tried using a different TV and still didn't get the windows display, just the boot screen and loading screen.
I know someone may ask this so yes, I've kept the channel on the TV to the correct input. AV4. Which is actually the first hdmi slot in the list. The others are AV5 and AV7.
ANYWAY, going back to the display settings. There they were. Both listed. Monitor and TV. The monitor was showing as the primary display. So i changed that and made the TV the primary display. No change whatsoever. I click apply.... BAM.... again I lose all display except a blank wallpaper on my monitor and still nothing at all showing on my TV.
I also saw in the "view HDCP status" that it showed two screens. Monitor and SONY TV. Obviously under monitor ir said your display does not support hdcp but under the sony tv it said that it DID support hdcp. So it IS finding the hdmi slot on the tv, it's just refusing to give me the damned display!
I tried unplugging the monitors dvi connection I STILL got nothing from the TV and ofcourse now getting no signal from Monitor. So i did a blind shut down. I hear the PC shutdown fine.
Boot up again, with just he hdmi cable left in, wait, hear the windows chimes on loadup, no display on TV at all. From boot to load up.
I then plug the dvi cable back in to get a display, leaving the hdmi lead plugged in at both ends and still got 'no signal from monitor'. I unplug the hdmi lead and presto.... monitor display is back. The second time I tried this I got the exact same result except on the blind shut down, which i know i did exactly right, i hear the shutdown chime, wait to hear the pc shutdown and fans turn off.... and wait....and wait.... and nothing. Not shutting down. I plug the dvi cable back in AGAIN and nothing. So then I need to do a hard shut down again. Ridiculous right?
I've tried troubleshooting at the TV's end. Unplugged it from power source and left it for 5 minutes. I've gone into the settings of the TV (which by the way are completely USELESS on this mode of TV for some reason). In HDMI setup there's three options. I tried them all on and off, still didn't help at all.
I've even tried a complete factory reset of the TV, that did nothing either.
From everything I've done, especially trying another TV with a good hdmi lead. That the problem isn't so much a hardware failure of any kind, it just seems like windows or my tv refuses to pick up the connection. It seem it may be a signal sending problem from the card or the TV isn't picking up the PC settings or something like that.
So at this point I thought ok enough is enough and I'm sure I've already bored anyone who is reading this fully. Imagine how I feel right now!
THANKYOU for reading all of this.
Please..... please please.... help. I'm completely out of ideas.... save a complete wipe and reinstall of windows but then there's no guarantee that'll fix the problem and I really don't want to have to do that anyway!
So I've been tearing my hair out for the 3rd day running with this problem.
A little backstory to help understand what's going on. For a couple of years now I've had my PC connected to my SONY Bravia HD ready LCD TV. A couple of rare instances in the past I've lost the display for unknown reasons but always managed to get it back, oddly, what seemed to work each time is stripping out my pc and leaving just the fans, cpu, psu and motherboard connected, even took out the bios memory disc (you know that little silver coin looking thing?). Dunno why all of that worked it just did.
I left my PC on to download (harmless download and not a windows update) and it was FINE. I went to walk my dog, came back about an hour or less later and found myself staring at a blank black screen on my TV. I moved the mouse, hit the keyboard start menu key, nothing. Checked the connection ends, nothing.
So I had no choice but to hard shutdown and power up again. Nothing.
Eventually, after again stripping out my PC (including BIOS memory) and putting it back together I managed to get my display back via vga cable to my 19" Dell Monitor.
Since then I've been trying EVERYTHING I can think of to get the display back on my SONY TV.
These are all the things I've tried.
- Tested different HD cables on my Sky+ HD. ALL fine.
- Hooked up vga to monitor and hdmi to TV. I get one of THREE things. 1. Nothing on TV and full display on Monitor OR 2. Nothing on TV and nothing on Monitor except a blank desktop wallpaper. All icons, taskbar EVERYTHING else gone, just a wallpaper. Cant see mouse movement either and no key functions bring any windows up. OR 3. Nothing on TV and display on Monitor changed to letterbox with all icons, taskbar etc showing and operable. Mouse movement visible, keyboard commands all working and displaying on screen.
- Tried updating my graphics card driver. Uninstalled drive properly and wiped wiped clean using driver sweeper. Installed newer drivers even though the previous driver was fairly new and worked perfectly fine before.
- Tried another HD LCD TV with ONLY HDMI cable attatched. Shows POST, Boot up and windows loading screen but then blank screen once loading screen disappears and just before the desktop should appear the TV displays 'NO signal' and asll I hear is the chimes to say windows has loaded.
-Tried using nVidia control panel. right-clicked desktop, clicked nvidia control panel, clicked on 'setup mulitple displays', clicked on 'my display is not shown'. At this point you see two options stacked on top of each other in a popup window. the top one is the 'Rigourous display option'. The bottom one is 'force television detection'. THIS bottom feature is completely ghosted out, including the checkbox that says next to it 'force television detection on startup'.
So I clicked the top option button that says 'rigourous display detection', it find nothing and then asks 'Would you like the television connection enabled?'. I clicked yes to that and the checkbox becomes ticked but ALL of the bottom option STILL remain ghosted out. After clicking ok the popup closes, I went back into it and saw the exact same thing I saw when I first clicked on it. force detection feature ghosted out completely and check box UNCHECKED again.
unforntunately this may well be because I didn't actually have the HDMI lead plugged into the PC end, duh? why not? well because of the problem mentioned before. When I plug the HDMI end into the PC again, I lose my whole display on my monitor (no icons, taskbar etc.) except for the wallpaper which is still showing, completely blank and so I can't do anything in windows.
At ONE point, I did manage to get a FULL working display on my monitor with a vga/dvi cable WHILST the hdmi lead was connected from PC to TV.
I went into the display settings and sure enough it was showing two displays listed. 1 was 'Dell1907FP' the other was 'SONY TV'. So I KNOW there's nothing wrong with the HD slot on the graphics card (Gainward nVidia geForce 260 GTX) and I know there's nothing wrong with the HD slot on the TV because the same slot works just fine with my sky+ hd box AND my PS3.
Unfortunately the other two slots don't work but that's irrelevant because as I said I tried using a different TV and still didn't get the windows display, just the boot screen and loading screen.
I know someone may ask this so yes, I've kept the channel on the TV to the correct input. AV4. Which is actually the first hdmi slot in the list. The others are AV5 and AV7.
ANYWAY, going back to the display settings. There they were. Both listed. Monitor and TV. The monitor was showing as the primary display. So i changed that and made the TV the primary display. No change whatsoever. I click apply.... BAM.... again I lose all display except a blank wallpaper on my monitor and still nothing at all showing on my TV.
I also saw in the "view HDCP status" that it showed two screens. Monitor and SONY TV. Obviously under monitor ir said your display does not support hdcp but under the sony tv it said that it DID support hdcp. So it IS finding the hdmi slot on the tv, it's just refusing to give me the damned display!
I tried unplugging the monitors dvi connection I STILL got nothing from the TV and ofcourse now getting no signal from Monitor. So i did a blind shut down. I hear the PC shutdown fine.
Boot up again, with just he hdmi cable left in, wait, hear the windows chimes on loadup, no display on TV at all. From boot to load up.
I then plug the dvi cable back in to get a display, leaving the hdmi lead plugged in at both ends and still got 'no signal from monitor'. I unplug the hdmi lead and presto.... monitor display is back. The second time I tried this I got the exact same result except on the blind shut down, which i know i did exactly right, i hear the shutdown chime, wait to hear the pc shutdown and fans turn off.... and wait....and wait.... and nothing. Not shutting down. I plug the dvi cable back in AGAIN and nothing. So then I need to do a hard shut down again. Ridiculous right?
I've tried troubleshooting at the TV's end. Unplugged it from power source and left it for 5 minutes. I've gone into the settings of the TV (which by the way are completely USELESS on this mode of TV for some reason). In HDMI setup there's three options. I tried them all on and off, still didn't help at all.
I've even tried a complete factory reset of the TV, that did nothing either.
From everything I've done, especially trying another TV with a good hdmi lead. That the problem isn't so much a hardware failure of any kind, it just seems like windows or my tv refuses to pick up the connection. It seem it may be a signal sending problem from the card or the TV isn't picking up the PC settings or something like that.
So at this point I thought ok enough is enough and I'm sure I've already bored anyone who is reading this fully. Imagine how I feel right now!
THANKYOU for reading all of this.
Please..... please please.... help. I'm completely out of ideas.... save a complete wipe and reinstall of windows but then there's no guarantee that'll fix the problem and I really don't want to have to do that anyway!
