I have a dusty room, so I decided to use compressed air to remove the dust from throughout my computer, including my graphics card. I used the compressed air to clear out my graphics card then put it back in. When I booted, right away I noticed the grub menu looked strange because the font looked 4x larger. (This happens when I have my dvi cable plugged into the wrong dvi port, but it doesn't matter anymore.)
When I tried to boot Ubuntu I would get a purple screen for a long time followed by a black screen... then nothing. After googling around on another computer I found that adding the "nomodeset" parameter to the grub boot options got me through to the log in. I am able to log in and use the computer, but now I have strange artifacting across the top of my screen and by cursor flickers.
I figured I had damaged my graphics card, except I am able to boot into Windows fine and run video games and graphics card tests. An interesting thing to note is the nvidia driver crashed when I started Windows the first time after cleaning, but was fine after that. This is very strange to me, because the bugs seemed like a hardware error. I tried removing the graphics card and placing it back in, but that doesn't seem to help at all.
So far I have tried:
- Taking gfx card out then back in
- Updating UEFI
- Resetting CMOS
- Booting from thumb drive Ubuntu (same issue)
- Changing PCI slot of gfx card
- Cleaning gfx card connectors with alcohol and swab.
I am using a Asrock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard with a Nvidia 670 gtx graphics card. Any help is welcome.
UPDATE:
I bought a nvidia 210 graphics card and swapped it out for my current card. I get the exact same issues with a different nvidia card. I'm not sure if I want to try another brand's card. I am starting to wonder if this could be on the motherboard.
I tried to boot into a Fedora live USB, but get a blank screen, which is what I get on Ubuntu unless I boot with nomodeset.
