My HDMI port on the Razer Blade Advanced 15 has not worked since I installed Ubuntu 20.04 (when I bought it in June 2021). I’ve not needed the HDMI port until now, so I thought I would upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 and maybe it would fix it…it didn’t.
Per many support threads out there, it appears to be related to my NVIDIA driver.
When I use:
$ sudo nvidia-settings
I get the following:
ERROR: NVIDIA driver is not loaded
I have tried the following commands with no success:
You’re currently running a non-standard kernel without the nvidia driver installed. An earlier boot with the nvidia driver resulted in NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x22:0x56:731)
which would point to defective hardware.
Please boot to the standard 5.15 kernel and check if it reproduces.
I had the same issue in 5.15 kernel. I don’t have that kernel installed right now as I started trying earlier versions of kernels to attempt to get it working (with no avail). I’ll go ahead and install 5.15 again and test / rerun nvidia-bug-report.sh as root. I’ll post here again later this evening.
Scratch that. I had to update to 5.18.19-051819-generic as my WIFI would not work properly on 5.15.63-051563-generic. Unfortunately, still having same HDMI problem.
You can’t just wildly install any kernel images, the headers have to be compatible so the nvidia driver can be compiled. Please use the liquorix ppa to get a new kernel and a working nvidia driver.
Software & Updates > Additional drivers, I have selected the NVIDIA driver metapackage from nvidia-driver-515 (proprietary, tested).
Here what I get when I run:
$ sudo nvidia-settings
ERROR: A supplied argument is invalid
(nvidia-settings:5644): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 22:18:27.397: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
** (nvidia-settings:5644): CRITICAL **: 22:18:27.399: ctk_powermode_new: assertion '(ctrl_target != NULL) && (ctrl_target->h != NULL)' failed
ERROR: nvidia-settings could not find the registry key file or the X server is
not accessible. This file should have been installed along with this
driver at
/usr/share/nvidia/nvidia-application-profiles-key-documentation. The
application profiles will continue to work, but values cannot be
prepopulated or validated, and will not be listed in the help text.
Please see the README for possible values and descriptions.
** Message: 22:18:27.441: PRIME: Requires offloading
** Message: 22:18:27.441: PRIME: is it supported? yes
** Message: 22:18:27.479: PRIME: Usage: /usr/bin/prime-select nvidia|intel|on-demand|query
** Message: 22:18:27.479: PRIME: on-demand mode: "1"
** Message: 22:18:27.479: PRIME: is "on-demand" mode supported? yes
In the NVIDIA settings popup, under PRIME Profiles, I have selected: “NVIDIA (Performance Mode)”
After this, I ran these commands but it didn’t change any of the NVIDIA Settings messages above:
I found this thread discussing issues with external monitor due to bios issue.
Razer released BIOS 1.09 which fixes the issue of not having DisplayPort out over the dGPU using the Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports. External monitors only worked through the iGPU and framerates took a hit.
Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the bios for this laptop without using their BIOS Updater which is only Windows compatible.
NOTE: I went into the bios to see if there was an option to check for updates, and there was not one. I will have to find the new version of the bios online and manually flash the bios.
Just posting this here as others may find this helpful later. I’ll keep looking.
Ok, I created a boot thumb drive (Hiren’s BootCD PE x64 (v1.0.2)) and was able to boot into Windows PE successfully. I downloaded the latest Razer Blad Bios Updater and placed it on a USB drive and ran it. I got a device error when running the bios updater file. The error looks related to a driver issue.
I noticed that my wifi didn’t work and so I imagine that this version of Windows will not work well with this Razer. I’m going to create another boot disk of a different version of Windows and try again.
The laptop doesn’t have an ethernet port, which is fine. My access to the internet is not the issue. I’m going to load a Windows ISO that is newer and hopefully it can run this Bios Updater exe file.
For all those who are waiting on my success story…[spoiler alert] keep waiting…
Well, I tried booting in Windows 10 from a USB thumb drive and it became a massive time consuming adventure to say the least.
Learn from my mistakes:
Don’t attempt to install Windows 10 onto a USB thumb drive or even an USB external drive. Apparently, Windows 10 will not allow it. You can create a bootable USB drive, but that is purely for booting into the Windows 10 installer.
Don’t install Windows 10 or another version of Windows on your laptop as a work around so that you can update the bios with the Razer Bios Update Software. I did this and when I downloaded the software to run the bios update I was met with a lovely message: “This firmware tool is for use only with Razer Blade and compatible system. This application will now close.” Despite the fact that I was indeed running Windows 10 (as suggested by Razer Support website) on a Razer Blad laptop. You MUST run the original Razer version of Windows that came with your laptop. By accident, I learned that you can request a copy of the original image of Windows that came with your laptop and restore it if needed. Of course, I needed to do that since I formatted the entire drive upon unboxing and immediately installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS at the time. I swear that this option was not available back in Sept 2022 when this entire thread started.
Don’t expect to keep Ubuntu installed when you go to restore your original image of Windows. When you do the restore, it formats your entire hard drive and you lose everything. Fun.
Do not assume that the restore install is frozen at 25%. When I restored my original Razer Windows image, the loading was moving along and then it stopped at 25% and stayed there for about 30 mins. I thought that it was stuck. I had already experienced a lot of issues leading up to this point regarding incompatibility issues and I assumed that this was just another one. I attempted to do this restore 5 times :(. As a last resort, I just started the restore again at 9:15AM and left my house to go get some breakfast. I was hungry and exhausted since I hadn’t been to bed yet and had been working on this issue since 4:30 PM the prior day. Once I came back with donut and coffee in hand: Viola! The restoration process was restarting the computer and starting the initial setup process. Donuts are a virtue.
Don’t try to restore the original Razer Windows image with a small thumb drive. My thumb drive was 16GB, but the restore file was bigger. I ended up using an external hard drive to boot from. The file was a ZIP and not an ISO. Once the zip is downloaded, you must unzip and then place it in the root directory of the USD drive that you will be booting from (must be NTFS). Do not try to unzip files on a Mac as it will fail after waiting 20 mins.
And last but not least: Once you have completely removed Ubuntu and restored the original Razer Blade Windows 10 image back on your laptop, don’t expect it to actually solve the problem. I spent 2.5 hours updating Windows 10 and now I still can’t use the HDMI port for my external monitor. Now I have Windows 10 up-to-date (which I don’t want) and no longer have Ubuntu Linux installed (which I want) and I still have not solved my original problem.
The master plan: At this point, I am going to create a support topic for this issue around the topic of HDMI port not working on Windows 10 and maybe someone will help. Once I get that working, I will resize the main partition where Windows 10 is installed (leaving it installed) and install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I’ll come back to this support thread to either report a working HDMI port, or continue the saga. To be continued…