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I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and updated my graphics card to Nvidia Quadro K4200 in order to get stereo capability. It worked with the recommended Ubuntu driver (nvidia-352), although I struggled to get stereo working, so I installed the latest Nvidia driver (361.42). To do this, I got a terminal with

Alt-Ctrl-F1

stopped X with

sudo service lightdm stop

and then ran the install script from NVIDIA. When I restarted X with

sudo service lightdm start

I got a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left of the screen and Alt-Ctrl-F[1-6] did not give a terminal login. My only option is a hard shutdown (holding down the start button) and when I reboot it returns to the black screen.

I saw this post which looks the closest to my problem that I found, with a solution that requires Alt-Ctrl-F1 which isn't giving me a terminal login option. Any suggestions are very much appreciated.

Community
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Sharky Le Shark
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4 Answers4

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Two thoughts: For low level logins, like you're doing, frequently the ENTER key must be pressed to get a login prompt.

Just because the graphics are crazy, doesn't mean that the daemons like sshd didn't come up properly.

Roger Smith
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I had a very similar problem with NVIDIA install script. I've booted into recovery mode (hold SHIFT before loading GRUB for a menu) and there was an option to open a root terminal.

Try those commands, reboot and see if it will fix your case:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

update-initramfs -u

You might need to remount with write priviledges to make those changes:

mount -o remount,rw /

With terminal you can of course remove NVIDIA and re-install nouveau-firmware, just run that update-initramfs -u afterwards. I think I fixed it just like that, but it was some time ago and my memory is foggy...

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GreggD
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0

I noticed on desperate rebooting I intermittently got a login prompt, sometimes giving my a couple of minutes of access before returning to the black screen and flashing cursor. I found in /var/log/kern.log the following error:

NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 361.42, but

NVRM: this kernel module has the version 352.63. Please

NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver

NVRM: components have the same version

NVRM: nvidia_frontend_ioctl: minor 255, module->ioctl fauled, error -22

I ran 

dpkg --get-selections | grep nvidia

for a list of nvidia packages that might be causing the conflict and removed and purged all of them individually

apt-get remove *package*

apt-get purge *package*

I also re-ran the NVIDIA driver install script to generate a customised kernel setup for good measure and re-ran the install.

This got me to the login screen on reboot, although logging in kept returning me to the login screen, but I could at least ctrl-alt-F1 for a terminal and there was plenty of help on this issue already on Ask.

Sharky Le Shark
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-1

Have you checked /var/log/Xorg.0.log for errors?

Or when you stop X, try startx rather than restarting the service.

Byte Commander
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1st Line Support
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