Arch Linux

vviktordev

Member

Registered: 2024-09-23

Posts: 2

Random black screen of death unless laptop is plugged in

Hi,

I've recently installed arch on an HP Pavilion 15-eh1339nw. I am experiencing a "black screen of death" where the laptop just randomly decides to go to sleep while in use, and the only way out is a hard reset by holding down the power button. I don't even know how to troubleshoot it. I will try to explain my observations as well as possible.

What does it look like? Imagine you're using your laptop and the screen just goes black. The keyboard backlight is still on, but it turns off after the set timeout and subsequent keystrokes don't turn it back on. No key works - I have tried typing in commands and then checking bash_history - the keystrokes aren't registered.

When does it happen? It seems to happen most often (or exclusively?) after a longer time of not using the laptop. By "longer" I mean a couple of hours. I turn the laptop on, it boots, and from then on it will probably take less than a minute before it decides to "turn off". Reboot it - the same thing happens. Then I plug the laptop in and that's where the fun starts - it prevents this problem completely. As far as I remember, the laptop has never done that when it was plugged in. At the moment of writing, I am using it completely unplugged after it has been plugged in for about an hour, and it's not causing problems either. But that's not a rule, I remember unplugging it and after a couple of minutes it turned off, so as far as I'm concerned, the only 100% "solution" is having it plugged in.

I suspect it falls asleep. The reason for that is I have some constant noise coming out of the laptop (probably a speaker problem), and when I voluntarily close the laptop, the noise stops, but so does it when the "black screen of death" happens. I also know it's not a hardware problem as I have windows 11 installed and it doesn't happen there. My installation is probably as pure as possible - I don't have a desktop environment or any weird dependencies that could cause issues - just a clean arch install. I do have i3 but the problems started way before I installed it.

How do I even begin to troubleshoot such an issue? What do I look at? What could be the potential cause (besides the obvious "power management")? Thanks

vviktordev

Member

Registered: 2024-09-23

Posts: 2

Re: Random black screen of death unless laptop is plugged in

Update: it just crashed while being plugged in. Still no idea what's going on