[clug] Laptop Problem

[Brett Worth]

Hi all.

My laptop is dead!  It's a Dell 9550 XPS 15 running Kubuntu 20.11.

Yesterday I noticed that the screen was not blanking when the screen lock
activated.  It looked like something that might cause burn-in so needed to
be addressed.  I checked the power settings and all seemed OK there.  I had
an outstanding reboot to activate a kernel upgrade so I thought I'd just do
that to see if it fixed the screen blanking problem.

That's when it all went bad.

Now I get the Dell splash screen immediately followed by the screen going
black (no backlight) followed by the backlight coming on but nothing on the
screen.  After a few seconds the CPU fan starts ramping up so the cpu is
just spinning.  I have tried hitting escape over and over to see if I could
break into grub but it will not.  The keyboard buffer just fills and beeps
rudely at me.

When I get home I plan to look at it again by booting an iso and see if the
disk looks OK.  The Dell diagnostics run to completion without error.

So my questions are:

       Could it be that the system is seeing a bogus suspend state at boot
and loading garbage?
       How does that work?  i.e. How does the BIOS know to just unsuspend?

If it was just trying to unsuspend then I should not be seeing the Dell
splash screen.  So perhaps it thinks it's waking from hibernation?  Now is
unhibernate triggered?

Anyway I just thought I'd rant about it so I don't cry about it.

-- 
Brett

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