EliteBook 845 G7 Hyper-V Black Screen of Death

[LKII_IT]

Installing Hyper-V causes frequent black screen of death, requiring a hard power down and restart.

This looks to be caused by an AMD platform limitation.  Hyper-V requires at least 1 GB of RAM be allocated to the GPU.  However, the BIOS only allows selecting 256 MB, 512 MB, or Auto (which defaults to 512 MB).

This link to Lenovo regarding the same AMD chipsets explains it a bit better.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht510806-black-screen-may-occur-if-enabling-hyper-v-in-wi...

Am I out of luck until HP releases an updated BIOS?

[pete_b1]

@LKII_IT have you found a solution?

We are also investigating if this blackscreens do attribute to SSD size. As trying laptops with 512GB SSD (Elitebook specs friendly) seems to work, whereas laptop with 1TB SSD (have tried two brands, one of them Elitebook specs friendly) seems to fail. Now need some time to confirm/refuse this theory

[update 26.4.2021: theory is refused as false]

[pete_b1]

We have bunch of Elitebooks with HyperV role installed, most of them sometimes failing to blackdeath screen, some not.

Possible differences might be

• faulty hardware
• faulty specific component's firmware. With some probability excluding BIOS (same versions&settings, one working one not)
• with smaller probability anything else

Common denominators of failing/ok laptops were (= probably not a root cause)

• software (windows and drivers version)
• SSD (NvME). We swapped NVMes from working to failing laptop and "working windows and drivers" on "failing laptop" did not introduce any change. Failing laptop still failed
• RAM modules. We swapped it from working to failing laptop and it did not introduce a change
• BIOS version and settings (especially the Video memory size. 512MB manually set)

Possible workarounds  (These are not a fixes, as they introduce another problems/constraints.)

• graphics card driver revert in Windows. If you completely uninstall graphics card drivers so the Windows can detect it only as something like "generic graphics adapter", than the "failing laptop" will be stable. Hovewer, you will not be able i.e. to connect any external monitor to the laptop, etc., as the generic graphics driver does not support this
• perhaps wifi driver revert, if you experience bad experience in Hyper-V guest apps and the host is on Wifi. We reverted one version back and the Outlook app in guest is now working normally

Screenshot of both laptops. Same SKUs, BIOS, BIOS settings in all fields. Can swap memory/SSD there and back, but the failing keeps failing and working keeps working.

(same screenshot on pasteboard.co)

How to fix it? Do not know. Any ideas?

[LKII_IT]

We've had the same issue with the included 256 GB SSD, or a 2 TB aftermarket.  After Hyper-V installed, doing nearly anything graphics related will cause the black screen of death (watching video, playing a game, etc.).

[pete_b1]

@LKII_IT do you recall what exactly triggered the black death?

We test it by running "The life of PI" movie in VLC player and the death is caused in range of 1-120 minutes from movie start. Several other less deterministic methods found. If you discovered anything more easy or faster, that could be helpful for us and the community to speed up the debug

[LKII_IT]

Launching Magic: The Gathering - Arena almost always caused the black screen.  It's free and apparently for whatever reason, is surprisingly taxing on CPU/GPU.