Suspend test seems to have killed my Intel NUC

Question

I was running the daily live Ubuntu 14.04-trusty-desktop-amd64 2014-01-24 on an Intel NUC D34010WYK. It has 16GB RAM and a Crucial 240GB SSD. Was working flawlessly, except for sound, so I started running the Systems tests (System > Administration > System Testing).

When I executed the Suspend test, the system did not automatically unsuspend after 60 seconds. It would not unsuspend by pressing the power button briefly. I can turn the NUC off by holding the power button down. But when I press the power button and power it back up, the screen(s) stay blank, with no input. I don't get to see anything: not the Intel NUC splash screen, nor anything of the Visual BIOS. Nothing. Nada. Basically, I can't power the machine back on.

What do I do? This is a horrible, horrible position to be put into. I never dreamed that Linux would kill my new PC.

I did some google searching, and tried using the procedure at http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-034211.htm under the Settings Were Changed in BIOS section, guessing that perhaps buggy code altered the BIOS. For a while I thought it was going to work: I was trying for an opportunity to hit F2 during reboot to reset the BIOS to the factory defaults: I moved the BIOS yellow "Security" jumper across to the pins to allow this, and by the time I switched the display over to HDMI input (for the NUC), I was rewarded by seeing a Grub boot screen, but in a weird display mode (very large text, pale grey). I even started booting up ubuntu, and got to the point where it said /home was missing (I hadn't plugged in the external HDD), when I thought I should really reset the BIOS to factory defaults, first. So I did Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot, and got the Intel NUC splash screen again - but nothing else. F2 didn't take me into BIOS setup, and the splash screen just stayed there. Since then I haven't managed to get it as far as the Grub boot menu, the best I can manage is to see the Intel NUC splash screen, which just sits there. Or if I move the jumper positions back to normal, I see nothing, just a blank screen when I power on.

I'm wondering whether I'm going to have to risk trying to reset the BIOS to a recovery one, as per http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-023360.htm; but I don't know what filesystem to use for the USB key. I suppose FAT would be the safest.

Solution

I found some Intel documentation (http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-034637.htm) that said that the system: "If you are using an HDMI monitor or HDTV that does not support a resolution of 1024x768, you cannot access the Intel® Visual BIOS Setup when pressing the F2 key." By booting up a 2nd PC and using it to set the DisplayPort connected monitor to 1024x768 mode and unplugging the HDMI cable to the main display, I could get the system to give me a grub boot menu. After booting Ubuntu, upon the next reboot, the BIOS screen appeared, and in this case it also displayed three options that weren't being displayed during this problem: options to hit F2, F7, or F10. I managed to reset the BIOS to defaults and the system now boots again.

I still think that it's pretty shocking that running a system test (in particular, to try to put the system into Suspend mode), could make the system unable to get as far as the BIOS, let alone the boot menu. A warning of this extreme-failure possibility would have been good on Ubuntu's part, in the system test; on Intel's part, not designing their BIOS so that the system could come close to being bricked like this is what I'd expect from a company that generally has very good Linux contributions and support. I note that of their NUCs, only three have this bizarre must-be-1024x768 mode problem. Especially since both monitors supported 1024x768 mode, they just happened to be not in that mode before the attempts to reboot. Kind of a double fail, by Intel, IMHO.

Comments

[LukeJKendall]

It appears that the previous comment mentioning a blog that may be helpful (blog.dustinkirkland.com/search/label/NUC) has been removed. Oh well.