Switched from optimus (AW17) - now it wont boot?

Hello everyone,

Im having a bit of a problem.

TL;DR - Pressed fn+f5 to switch Optimus settings and now windows 8 crashes right after boot-up.
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Im going home to visit some family this weekend and decided to bring my AW17 r1 along for some movie watching in the train.

I boot it up in the train, turn off the lights and press fn+f5 to reboot without the dGPU to extend the battery life.

And this is where it gets problematic.

It will boot into Windows fine, but after a couple of seconds it gets to a start up-process which apparently after the Optimus-switch makes the PC crash.. Mouse and keyboard input stops working although it does kinda look like it's doing something and hasn't crashed completely, but I can't access it.

The biggest problem is that the freezing occurs before I get a chance to press fn+f5 again, and I'm now stuck in a loop where I can't boot up.

I might add that I'm running it pretty heavily overclocked with Mr. Fox' driver and svl7/slv7(?) vbios.

I can get it to boot up in safe mode just fine and I have tried fiddling with power settings since I figured that might be the problem, it still doesn't work when I tried to boot up normally, and since the fn+ shortcuts aren't available in safe mode it doesn't really help me much, and I can't find anywhere in the OS(or BIOS) where I can turn off Optimus.

I hope anyone is able to help or this is gonna be a loooong train ride.

 

I managed to download the latest nvidia driver on my phone and install it on the laptop.

It boots (and works) somewhat fine now, although i still can't change between optimus and no optimus. The shortcuts just doesnt work.

 

This is making no sense to me.

PC is crashing
Install new GPU drivers
PC stops crashing

Can't enter Nvidia control panel because "the monitor you are using right now is not connected to a Nvidia GPU", although i just installed new drivers for it which made it not crash, but apparently its not even turned on. Weird that the drivers made a difference.

 

What GPU is this? 880M? Then there will be problems with Svl7's vBIOS...

 

If the shortcut doesn't work you might have to re-install the Onscreen Display Driver. (OSD Driver)

 

i am also getting this when i switch back to optimus mode, it would load to the desktop but freeze.

i managed to get around it by booting into safe mode and disabling the intel GPU in the device manager, reboot then reenable the intel GPU then reboot again and it would not crash.

i might do a full OS install again just to start clean again.

 

If this issue started while you were travelling & after, then there's a possibilty of the MXM slot seating....try to re-seat, been through these type of posts often, even happened to me recently.

May also be due to OSD , OS issue (might need a clean install), Post-Windows update environment (try to roll back if this was done, before that try a system restore.)

 

i am thinking of doing a clean install after switching it to optimus mode and a good opportunity to upgrade my 120gb msata ssd to a 256gb msata ssd.

i wonder if it is caused by a modded vbios?

 

looks like reinstalling the OS while in dedicated mode may have caused the freezing when i switch back to optimus so i switched back to optimus then installed the OS and it works fine.

edit: looks like also having HWInfo running when you disable the nvidia gpu also freezes the laptop.