2

So I managed to fairly severely mess up my graphics card driver. I was trying to install OpenCL using instructions from here: http://orbigo.net/2012/07/installing-nvidia-opencl-cuda-sdk-in-ubuntu-12-04-lts/

I dropped down to a shell using ctrl+alt+F1, and stopped the lightdm service. Then I ran the file from nVidia. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to install the driver that came with the package. When I tried to restart lightdm after this, my system showed the ubuntu splash screen and then froze up with a black screen with a blinking cursor. I then tried to reboot my computer, but it seems to lock up while starting up. I get the Ubuntu splash screen, but then I get a black screen listing a bunch of services that have been started. The last service on this list is lightdm, which it says started ok, but it seems to freeze after that.

I believe Ubuntu has some sort of recovery option on the grub menu, so I tried loading into that. The problem here is that I can't seem to get into the grub menu. It appears to be the same issue as this: Grub Menu doesn't appear when pressing SHIFT

I booted up using a LiveCD with Ubuntu 12.04 on it, and tried fixing the grub as per the answer I linked. Unfortunately because I'm running off a LiveCD, it doesn't seem to like the update-grup step, since the boot table is different or something like that... I get the error: error: cannot find a device for / (is /dev mounted?). when I try this. I also tried grub-install /dev/sda but I seem to get the same error here.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.10. I forget exactly what graphics card I have, but it's an older (~6 years or so?) nVidia one. There aren't any other OS's installed on my machine.

Any help to get my computer back into a usable state without having to reinstall the OS would be appreciated.

UPDATE: I have managed to fix grub using the boot-repair tool, and can get into recovery mode. Now I just have to figure out how to fix my graphics card driver from here. The root terminal option is working.

Community
  • 1
Straemer
  • 313

1 Answers1

3

I managed to resolve this issue. The first step was to fix grub such that I could boot into recovery mode. I did this using an Ubuntu 12.04 LiveCD, as outlined here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

I used the graphical method (boot-repair).

Once grub was repaired, I rebooted my computer (removing the LiveCD), and booted into recovery mode (from the grub menu, I selected advanced boot options for ubuntu, and then the recovery mode for the most recent kernel version (the second option from this menu)).

From recovery mode, I selected the "network" option to enable networking. This took about 5 mins or so to actually connect to the network, and wasn't very obvious that it was actually working. Once networking was enabled, I selected the "root" option to drop to terminal. From here, I ran the following command:

apt-get install nvidia-current --reinstall

Which reinstalled my graphics card driver. I also reinstalled lightdm (apt-get install lightdm --reinstall), although I'm not sure as to whether or not this was actually helpful.

At this point I rebooted the computer with the command reboot, and everything was back to normal.

Straemer
  • 313