MSI GS73 Stealth 8RF-014US will not load Mint, Manjaro or others

HouseSlinger · 08-14-2018, 05:03 PM

Hello all from a long time stalker but first time poster. I can normally figure things out but this new laptop has me stumped. Bought it 2 months ago and immediately tried to get a dual win 10/Mint Linux going but gave up after wasting a day on this. I have Mint (18.3) on a desktop that also dual boots and a couple other laptops (no windows) which all have Nvidia chips that I was able to get installed correctly.

Anyways I figured it might be too new to have good driver support and so I decided to wait until Windows drove me off the cliff before trying again. That happened yesterday morning and so I spent the rest of the day trying new distros, versions, and desktop environments to no avail. Still want to keep windows but it is backed up in case I need to start from scratch. To this point I have tried the following:

Mint 19 (Cinnamon)
Mint 18.3 (Cinnamon)
Mint 18.3 (KDE Plasma)
Mint 17.xx (tried a couple)
Kubuntu 18.04 (read that it was better with Nvidia cards...)
Ubuntu 18.04
Manjaro 17.1.11 (KDE)

So as you can see I am open to trying different distros, but whatever ends up working on this laptop will likely determine what I have on the other machines. A much as I want to stick with Mint, Manjaro is intriguing and is the closest I have come to making this work. All other distros did not make it to the login screen after install but was able to get in with Manjaro. For the most part if I can get in, I usually can figure it out, but I am not advanced enough to work through the recovery mode terminal without specific instructions (none worked that I could find online).

So I am going to roll with Manjaro unless there is a strong reason not to since I like the rolling update model and sick of dealing with cinnamon issues that seem to revolve around the nvidia cards.

As of writing this, I was able to log in but it is obvious that the video card is not working correctly (heavy lag and glitchy). I tried switching from the bumblebee drivers to the official nvidia drivers and after a reboot I am getting a number of start up errors that does not end in the login screen

Code:

[0.447100] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed \. AE_NOT_FOUD (20170728/psparse=55)
[0.458616] ACPI Error: No handler for Region [EC_] (ffff97e1acd67b88) [EmbeddedControl] (20170728/evregion-166)

[0.458624] ACPI Error: Region EmbeddedControl (ID=3) has no handler (20170728)/exfdio-299)
[0.458631] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.EC._REG, AE_NOT_EXIST (20170728/psparse-550)

[0.562325] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, Evaluating PRS (20170728/pci_link-176)
[0.562338] “”
[0.562349] “”
[0.562358] “”
[0.562368] “”
[0.562377] “”
[0.562387] “”
[0.562396] “”

[0.971596] mmc0: Unknown controller version (3). You May experience problems.

Followed by 3 failed attempts to load the kernal.

I have been getting these errors on all distros both on live versions and when trying to boot after an install. The failing to load kernal errors are manjaro specific after I tried changing the Nvidia drivers. I have fast boot turned off, secure boot disabled and install from USB created by Rufus (DD mode). Bios and firmware have not been updated based on what I can see online.

I am going to try to undo what I did with the graphics card but otherwise will start over with a fresh install. I read online not to be worried about the ACPI issues but the controller one seems a bit more sinister. Let me know if you need any other screen prints and video card is GTX 1070 based on the specs. Thanks in advance if you can help!

business_kid · 08-16-2018, 03:32 AM

With something like this, start by updating pci.ids & usb.ids if you can, and then posting the output of lspci and lsusb. ACPI errors usually don't prevent a boot, but present annoying issues. At a guess, some hardware isn't being recognized. Video certainly has issues.

I ran into the problem (some time back) that 'generic pci support' (= generic chipset support now) was enabled along with some chip sets. The generic driver was loaded first, except my crappy m/b was not generic. So I had to do an early kernel compile, and undo any kernel updates :-/.

Another useful move is to rename /var/log/messages (or whatever your syslog is) and run

Code:

sudo touch messages

which will create an empty file. Then reboot. you can then read through the output of dmesg and /var/log/messages and post the errors with relevant context. I do _not_ want a post the size of a telephone directory, please. I don't like telephone directories. Just what the kernel is complaining about. And if it's repeated 200 times, don't post it 200 times, just tell us

. We'll believe you.

EDIT: If it will read a usb drive, and recognizes the mouse, you can try

Code:

sudo cat >> <usb drive/errors.txt <<eof

It will sit there accepting pastes until you type 'eof.' Then grab that and post to us on a sensible computer :-D.

HouseSlinger · 08-17-2018, 07:28 PM

Sorry for the delay and thanks for the response! I made some progress but still have these ACPI errors. I was able to get it to boot Manjaro, updated the system and updated the kernal to 4.17.12-1.1. I still had some video issues and tried the xfce version instead of KDE. It is working much better, but still have a ways to go. I found that the primary laptop display works when the bumblebee drivers are installed but the external hdmi and display port only work on the proprietary 390.xx nvidia drivers. Regardless, I am able to log in, have a somewhat stable system and I have found many posts on connecting external displays with the bumblebee drivers that I will check out before bugging you with that.

Also really appreciate the error log tip, and hopefully the below outputs are not telephone books

Code:

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 8th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 07)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 3e9b
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Thermal Controller (rev 10)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 10)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM (rev 10)
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] (rev 10)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller (rev 10)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Device a353 (rev 10)
00:1b.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device a340 (rev f0)
00:1b.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port 20 (rev f0)
00:1b.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port 21 (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port 9 (rev f0)
00:1d.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device a334 (rev f0)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device a30d (rev 10)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller (rev 10)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller (rev 10)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP104M [GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile] (rev ff)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 High Definition Audio Controller (rev ff)
03:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5250 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
3e:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2500 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)

lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1038:1122 SteelSeries ApS 
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:c52b Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 8087:0aaa Intel Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 5986:1140 Acer, Inc 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

business_kid · 08-19-2018, 02:49 PM

They're not telephone books :-).

Np problem on the error tricks - basic console survival techniques are always handy, especially when you're up the creek.

That is a new beast, many of those devices aren't listed yet in the usb ids. If things refuse to work you may have to go to a bleeding edge kernel and assist driver development :-(. I dislike the bleeding edge, because you bleed too. I've been there.