No Longer Booting with Second Display Connected

General system Newbie
1

Background: One of the fans in my machine has been making a tapping noise. I narrowed it down to the CPU fan, and noticed that it stops if I detached it from the heatsink. I figured that one of the clips wasn’t put on correctly initially and had just vibrated out of place.

I have to remove my GPU in order to remove the CPU fan; I powered the machine down and switched the PSU off, did the work, and reinstalled the GPU. Not only did this not resolve the issue with the fan noise, but now I’m having a much larger issue.

When powering the PC on with both of my monitors connected, the PC does not boot past the motherboard splash screen and continues to reboot over and over. This is resolved by booting with only one monitor connected, and in fact if I reconnect the other monitor after booting normally it works fine.

Is there any possibility that this is a software issue?

2

Hmm, just a wild stab in the dark, but may your BIOS have lost some of its settings, because of the repairs you’ve been doing? Did you have to remove the CMOS battery (if there still is such a battery present nowadays) at all?

3

Haven’t pulled the CMOS or done anything else yet, I wanted to see if this was some kind of Arch/EOS-specific issue anyone has encountered first; any more hardware troubleshooting will have to wait until after work.