Bad Timing & Wrong Assumptions

So this happened a few months ago and the frustrations it brought made this clickbait title we have before us... To be fair though if I had just checked the source device first instead of assuming it was something else that happened at the same time I would not have wasted even more time. I think it captures that essence. (I titled this post then and never got to writing it, ADHD win)

The night felt early, the kids were in bed and with nothing on the plate it was time to hit up the office space and see what sparked interest!

Loading up some media streaming service plus VS Code, figured I would tackle some coding for the #100DaysofCodeLW3/#100daysofcode w/ @LearnWeb3DAO. I did some modifications to the project I was working on at the time, the episode of Rick and Morty just ended and my computer had updates requiring a restart. A fantastic time to take a small break, let the computer restart, and come back to make a few more small updates I had planned out!

Well, the computer is updated, but one of my monitors is no longer working. Oh great, what did this update do? Let's try to do a fresh install of the video drivers. No, okay... Let's do a rollback of the latest update? Still a no, so I went into the computer and reseated my GPU (and RAM while I was there just in case), plus tried the internal graphics port.

No, okay... Now wasting way too much time, it was late and I was feeling the moment. This would have been better approached had I just walked away and dealt with it in the morning...

One last thing (twice) before I assume it was the monitor itself, a System Restore!

It restarted and told me something failed so decided to retry it, which would turn out to be the biggest mistake of the night. This time it only restarted, literally, all it would do is restart and present me with a pleasant screen like this:

I looked up the stop code and tried anything that sounded plausible in the BIOS, but my main concern was more around corrupt files and hoping somehow I didn't lose a bunch of stuff (thankfully anything important was not even on that drive and was backed up recently beforehand too). Somehow with it being late my brain didn't seem to be thinking logically AT ALL! It was already one of those long weeks and an evening of relaxing become torture.

My USB with Windows was too old or some other factor was at play (I did adjust BIOS settings for this too), but it became a pain just to enter the Boot Repair screen.

• Power down the PC

• Power up then hold the power button until it turns off

• Repeat this 3 times

• Should detect a failed boot and load Boot Repair

• Repeat until it works

It felt like 2-5 repeats of the whole process each time and nothing there was resolving the issue either...

Time for a nap before the kids start to wake up and perhaps it will help clear my mind.

As I fall asleep I remembered seeing a USB labelled kali, so come the morning, after life around me has settled, I jump back into it, plug in the USB and am presented with a much nicer blue screen! (Looking something like this)

With Kali loaded I go in and peek around the partitions and verify anything on the OS drive that should not be lost is backed up. I did look at some other options within Kali as well, but at this point, I would have probably wasted even more time just learning more than I needed. So I just created a new Bootable Windows installer and went through the installation process with the previous version still in place. Lost most apps, but it did do a partial .old and saved some random things, which did not matter at this point anyways.

Looking back, I do feel like an idiot, but I did learn about a few new tools I could try out on Linux along the way, so that was a silver lining. The other is that my monitor was not dead after all.

After some much needed rest (no matter how "not long enough" it was) and a booting computer, I went back to basics and swapped out my Display Port to HDMI...

I still have not had a chance to get a new Display Port <-> Display Port yet to test whether it is my cable or the port on my monitor. I may have an adapter lying around somewhere, but honestly after all that, I kind of walked away since it was working and if it ain't broke ...