I recently purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 6 laptop and installed Ubuntu 24.04 on it. I use an Anker USB-C hub for easily connecting PD (Power Delivery), a wired network cable, and peripherals, such as a webcam, a monitor, and other USB devices.
After returning from a recent trip, the USB-C PD and the HDMI output stopped working, inexplicably. After disconnecting the USB-C hub and reconnecting it numerous times, I had to take the troubleshooting process in a new direction. One of my first stops was the “Additional Drivers” app in Ubuntu 24.04.
This Lenovo ThinkPad has an NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation laptop graphics card. My team and I have had a lot of strange issues with Nvidia graphics cards and drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux. In the past, we’ve had to try out different driver versions in order to get HDMI output working well and to solve other issues.
With this past history, I jumped into the “Additional Drivers” app and saw that my machine was using the latest and greatest “NVIDIA driver metapackage from nvidia-driver-550 (proprietary, tested)”.
This driver certainly seemed like the best pick, and I hadn’t needed to fuss with this version in the past with this particular hardware, but now I had HDMI output failing. I tried out “NVIDIA driver metapackage from nvidia-driver-535 (proprietary)”, and then rebooted… no dice. It still failed to output HDMI over the USB-C hub.
I repeated that exercise with “NVIDIA driver (open kernel) metapackage from nvidia-driver-550-open (proprietary)” and even “X.Org X server – Nouveau display driver from server-xorg-video-nouveau (open source)”. Sadly, all of these attempts were in vain, as the USB-C charging and HDMI output over USB-C continued to refuse to function.
I’ve also seen the odd OS / kernel update resolve graphics issues, so I also went through at least a few rounds of:sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y
Afterwards, the system continued to fail to function as desired.
I tried updating system firmware, new HDMI cables, and new USB-C power cables. I even tried ordering a new USB-C hub! Nothing worked! Frustration was mounting.
Skeptically following an unlikely lead
After doing some additional Googling, I stumbled upon a post on the Lenovo forums titled “P1 Gen 4 ThinkPad USB C quit functioning“. The author stated:
Got through to an Agent again today, used the “Emergency pinhole reset” Everything is working now.
Um, what? I had never heard of this “emergency pinhole reset” devilry before. Could it really be that simple?? I flipped my noble ThinkPad P1 over to see if I could find this mysterious pinhole.
And there it was… right below the “G” on the WARNING label at the bottom of the ThinkPad P1 near the center, there is a tiny little pinhole that is left of the larger laptop chassis screw hole. At this point, I was still thinking “emergency pinhole reset, what in the world?”
I grabbed a safety pin, bent it open, and inserted it into the emergency pinhole to perform an “emergency pinhole reset”, as shown in the image below.
After performing this seemingly hocus pocus procedure, I flipped the laptop back over, booted up, decrypted the disk, logged into the desktop environment, and then connected the USB-C hub…
and then…
IT WORKED! 🎉
USB-C hub HDMI output and PD (Power Delivery) functionality was restored!
As I stared at my now-functional-again gear, I shook my head in disbelief that an “emergency pinhole reset” procedure is even a thing that exists in 2024. Wild.
I was super stoked to have fully functional hardware and peripherals again, and very glad that I wouldn’t have to go through the Lenovo Warranty Repair process.
If you’ve had to struggle through a similar issue, I hope this post helped!
