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My graphics cards aren't supporting multiple monitors all of a sudden.
I have a system with a Geforce GTX 970 graphics card and a Geforce GTX 760 card, which each run 2 monitors, for a total of 4. 8 core AMD, with 32gb ram. Win10.
A few days ago a plug-in for Adobe After Effects needed me to upgrade my graphics card drivers via a prompt, and I allowed it to proceed. Usually I DL direct from Nvidia. After a restart, several Adobe products (up to date through CC) began to crash on start-up.
Upon checking, it seems the driver selected for me was not the current Nvidia 372.90. I uploaded to that, which yielded no better results. The whole system was performing fine, except the three graphics intensive Adobe apps all continued to crash on start-up. Several days of troubleshooting, with clean uninstalls, re-installs (of both Adobe and Nvidia) got me nowhere. Then yesterday, after rolling back the Nvidia drivers (with no luck) I upgraded back to the 372.90. The install went a little off, and went into a black screen with a non-responsive mouse visible.
A hard restart brought the system on line, and showing the driver had installed. Again, no luck with the program loads, which had started the whole troubleshooting odyssey. (Many many pages looked at, with many different suggested fixes) I would have pushed my system back to a restore point before all this mess, but it couldn’t access the restore point. Possibly an indication of something being out of whack?
My system has gone through multiple operating systems over many years, and I decided this might be a good justification to clear everything with a clean OS install. So, I bite the bullet and installed Win10 to my SSD and started with a clean slate. Windows pulled up an older graphics driver to load in, and my system went from the one screen back to multi. Next I fished out the 372.90 and began installing that. It started out fine, then dove into the black screen.
A hard restart, and it started entering a pattern where it would work for 2 seconds then go to a black screen for a minute or so. The mouse would also go into and out of responsiveness, as if the OS was blinking on, and blinking off. The timing made it impossible to reboot in safe mode (Since fast booting and an SSD made the keyboard shortcut unworkable). After another reinstall of windows, I saw the same problem reappear when Windows auto installed a 2015 version of the Nvidia drivers.
Finally seeing a mention of a similar problem being traced to multiple monitors, I disconnected the other three monitors connected to the system, and suddenly my system was working fine on a single monitor. I installed the 372.90 Nvidia driver, and after rebooting just to check all was perfect on the single monitor set-up. I tried hooking up one of the other monitors as a test, and when I went to detect it, my main monitor started going once again into the cycle of long black pauses. I was able to regain 1 monitor functionality by disconnecting the second monitor and rebooting, but this is a very bad situation for me.
What might be causing my problems? I thought it was the 372.90 but even on older drivers it is not letting me work with more than one monitor now. I would have thought the clean install of windows would have cleared away any conflicting code, but no. My cards have been solid, so I didn’t think it was hardware related. I’ve been on these monitors for years without problem. What started as an error problem loading a few graphics intensive programs has now smothered my whole system.
Do you have any ideas of a possible solution, or at least a way to diagnose the problem?
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