I came back to my computer after sleeping only to find that my monitor wouldn't wake up. Since my Radeon graphics card made its way into the trash heap last month, I had been taking advantage of the Sandy Bridge integrated graphics processor on my CPU until buying a new graphics card. I did buy a Radeon R7 260X, but apparently there are major problems with that card causing black screens because of some BIOS bug, and I got one of the bad cards. http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... creen.html
Anyhow, I switched inputs on my monitor using the button on the front panel and that didn't work. Then I thought maybe it was a Linux driver-related problem with the open source Intel drivers, so I pressed the reset button on the machine and still got a black screen from post all the way through the boot process, and I did this a couple times. Next, I plugged in a second monitor to the DVI out on the back of the motherboard and got video on that monitor. I tried unplugging and replugging the HDMI cable on my main monitor, and that was a no-go. I then noticed that the monitor that was getting black screens got video when in the graphical UEFI setup screen, yet it wasn't getting a signal during the POST process and that had never happened before. It then started getting video when I got to the GRUB bootloader screen which was unrelated to anything I did besides plugging in the second monitor. At this point I was kind of at a loss and decided to reset the CMOS and if that didn't work, I was going to reflash the BIOS.
Clearing the CMOS worked. I have no idea why this problem happened; my main monitor connected via HDMI always had a video signal during the entire POST process and always woke up from sleep without a hitch. We had a power outage a while back and my PC lost power, but this problem didn't happen until weeks after that. Maybe a ghost was fucking with my PC?
By the way, MSI motherboards (at least my generation) have pretty buggy UEFI firmware. Sometimes hitting delete won't get you into the UEFI interface (probably something with the USB keyboard), and I remember the earlier firmware versions were notoriously buggy. For instance, the x and y coordinates were flipped when moving the mouse around in the setup screen on one version. I'm not sure if I'll buy an MSI motherboard again; the hardware is great, but I was never overly impressed with their UEFI firmware. Can't we just go back to regular BIOS's? This UEFI crap is really stupid and way overly complicated to just boot a fucking PC.