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This is the same dreaded story in Ubuntu with nVidia drivers ... I got a new machine with the K2200 nVidia card in it and now I'm unable to boot again after installing the latest nVidia drivers for this card. This machine is behind a heavy secured proxy and I need to do a lot of trial error before getting internet and the latest update version of trusty 14.04, but for this I also needed a desktop up and running therefore I installed the nVidia driver from its download site.

I would like to reset back the display settings to default or minimal display to have a working environment. How can I do that? Note I have done several attempts and the backup settings may be gone.

UPDATE (1)

To install the nVidia driver I did the following:

  • Download the driver of Quadro K2200 from a different machine
  • copy it into a USB drive
  • Install the driver in the new machine.

UPDATE (2)

I managed to run 

$ sudo ./NVIDIAxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --uninstall

it acknowledged that nVidia was successfully uninstalled but still I still see no desktop after boot just the black screen of voidness.

SkyWalker
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2 Answers2

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  1. From the black screen where the computer has stopped when booting it, open a text-only virtual console by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+F3.

  2. At the login: prompt type your username and press Enter.

  3. At the Password: prompt type your user password and press Enter.

  4. Now you are logged in to a text-only console, and you can run terminal commands from the console. In this example, assume that you have downloaded an NVIDIA driver file called /NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.72.run from the official NVIDIA website to your Downloads folder and installed it. 

    cd ~/Downloads ## change directory to the location of the graphics driver that you downloaded from the official NVIDIA website
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.72.run --uninstall   
sudo reboot

    Replace the location and driver name in the above commands with the location and name of the driver that you installed. If you can't remember the name of the graphics driver file that you installed, use the ls command to list the contents of the directory where the graphics driver file that you downloaded is located.

When you reboot the computer it will be using the Nouveau default open source graphics driver that is built-in in Ubuntu.

karel
  • 114,770
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If you can get into system console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1, then login there and run

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

If you can't, then boot to recovery mode using grub menu, choose "root" option and run there:

mount -o remount,rw /
apt-get purge nvidia*
reboot

This is applicable to cases, when you installed Nvidia drivers normal way, using apt-get.

If you installed them according to some bad manuals with blacklisting nouveau and running a file downloaded from Nvidia site, it is another case.

The easiest way to uninstall Nvidia drivers is to run same file like that

./nvidia-xxxxxxxx.run --uninstall

And if you blacklisted nouveau, then you need to revert that too.

Pilot6
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