Oculus Rift Headset isn't working--nothing on the viewer--just a yellow light

[ColinMaverick]

I'm not a tech person, but I am trying to fix my 14 year old son's VR thing. Can anyone offer some troubleshooting tips? He hasn't used it in several months and when we went to turn it on, we can't get the headset to work. Fruit Ninja, for example,shows on the monitor but not in the headset. I've done all of the updates, but nothing seems to work. Any ideas or suggestions are appreciated.

[Professional Stupid]

One potential solution, is just restarting the computer, you would not believe how often problems can be solved by simply turning the system off, and back on again.

Another thing to check is whether or not the HDMI cord is plugged into the graphics card, it has to be plugged into the graphics card, no other HDMI ports will work very well with something like the Oculus Rift

otherwise, there are a few suggestions I have that should work.

First, make sure your graphics card's drivers are up to date. Updating the drivers for the graphics card is pretty simple though, and doesn't take too terribly long, but different graphics card manufacturers have different drivers, so the best way to get the up to date drivers differs as well, but in most, if not all cases, the manufacturer will release the updates themselves, third party drivers shouldn't be trusted and might download viruses onto the computer so go to the website of the card manufacturer to find the driver updates. In my case, I have an AMD card, and they have made an app to help with various different things regarding the graphics card, I can download driver updates from that app, so if you find that your manufacturer has one of these apps, it might be worth your while to download it if you don't already have it. when it comes to graphics intense software like games and the Rift, out of date graphics drivers can also lead to sudden crashes, and even bluescreens without error messages (specifically when the monitor goes blue and says no input) it is a good practice to update the drivers often


Secondly, what you should do is go to the Oculus app on the computer, likely, if the headset has not been used for a while it needs to be set up again. Once in the app, go to the devices tab and if it doesn't pop up a message at the top of the window, go to "configure rift", and then to "full setup" and follow the instructions it gives you.

Third, if you have done all that has been listed above, and it still doesn't work, restart the computer again, it is possible the problem has been solved by doing the steps above, but without a restart, the changes cannot be implemented, this can also be a problem between the first and second step and it has the same solution

Finally, if it still doesn't work, there is something else wrong with it. Unfortunately if this is the case, I don't know the solution, but a good place to look for it is Oculus's website, they have a support page that can likely provide you with a solution.

Best of luck to you!