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I was having issues with the 304 nvidia drivers, so I decided to downgrade to the 295 drivers. I did so by dropping out of X, stopping lightdm, and installing the drivers. However, now my computer won't boot into Ubuntu at all. It hangs on

stopping anac(h)cronistic cron

and nothing happens. I have to manually shut it off. Booting into failsafeX mode doesn't work either. I'm writing this from a live USB because I can't figure out what else to do. Any ideas? Is there a way to purge the nvidia files while booted into the live USB?

Brian
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1 Answers1

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If it's completely dead (no terminal/console by CtrlAltt or CtrlAltF2 then you might need to boot off your LiveUSB and then chroot into the hard drive.

First, boot off the LiveUSB and open a terminal window. Next mount the Ubuntu root partition: 

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

You'll need to change sda1 to be your actual Ubuntu boot partition. Have a look at:

sudo fdisk -l

if you're not sure. Next, export the LiveCD filesystem to the root filesystem on the drive:

sudo mount ‐‐bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount ‐‐bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount ‐‐bind /sys /mnt/sys

Now change the root filesystem to the hard disk:

sudo chroot /mnt

No re-install the nouveau driver:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

Then reboot and try again.

It might also be useful to remove the troublesome modules eg:

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-current

or 

sudo a-t-get remove nvidia-current-updates
fabricator4
  • 8,375