5

I recently installed Ubuntu. Everything was working just fine until I wanted to change the selected driver for my laptop (Lenovo Y50) under the Additional Drivers tab in settings.

I added the ppa: graphics-drivers software source and then I selected the latest available driver. I don't remember the version. Then I proceeded to restart my computer, but now it just gets stuck at a black screen with the message /dev/sda2: clean, 290961/14106624 files, 4246276/56401920 blocks.

I can't use the CTRL + ALT + F1 (or F2...etc) shortcut, literally nothing happens when I try.

karel
  • 114,770
Jorge Padilla
  • 65

1 Answers1

6

  1. Immediately after the motherboard / computer manufacturer logo splash screen appears when the computer is booting, with BIOS, quickly press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the GNU GRUB menu. (If you see the Ubuntu logo, you've missed the point where you can enter the GRUB menu.) With UEFI press (perhaps several times) the Esc key to get to the GRUB menu. Sometimes the manufacturer's splash screen is a part of the Windows bootloader, so when you power up the machine it goes straight to the GRUB screen, and then pressing Shift is unnecessary.

    The timing when to press the left Shift key can be tricky, so sometimes if you miss it you need to try it again. If that doesn't work try the answers to I can't get the GRUB menu to show up during boot.

  2. From the first purple GNU GRUB screen select Advanced options for Ubuntu with the ↑ and ↓ keys and press Enter. You will then be prompted by a menu that looks something like this:

    enter image description here

  3. Press the down arrow key until you select the second entry from the top (the one with the recovery mode in the description) and then press Enter.

    Now you should see this recovery menu:

    recovery menu

  4. Using the arrow keys scroll down to network (the third entry from the bottom in the Recovery Menu) and then press Enter.

  5. Using the arrow keys scroll down to root and then press Enter twice.

    You should now see a root prompt, something like this:

     root@ubuntu:~#

  6. At this stage you should have a read-only filesystem. You have to remount it with write permissions:

     mount -o rw,remount /

  7. Uninstall the Nvidia driver.

     apt-get remove nvidia-graphics-drivers-*  
 add-apt-repository --remove ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa  
 apt-get update  
 reboot

  8. After you reboot the laptop, check if it is running properly. Let the built-in ubuntu-drivers program decide automatically which proprietary graphics drivers to install. Open the terminal and type:

    sudo ubuntu-drivers install   
sudo reboot

    The install option of ubuntu-drivers installs drivers that are appropriate for automatic installation including their dependencies.

I don't know what version of Ubuntu you are using. The latest Nvidia driver in Ubuntu 16.04 is nvidia-375, but even if the recommended graphics driver is nvidia-346 or nvidia-current, it would be OK.

karel
  • 114,770