Ubuntu – Black screen on boot when any NVIDIA drivers installed

15.10cudadriversnvidiaxorg

I have a machine with Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 and an NVIDIA GTX 970 graphics card. For the last few months it was working fine with NVIDIA driver 352.63 and CUDA 6.5 installed, however I recently tried installing CUDA 7.5 using the .deb from NVIDIA's site and running:

sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1504-7-5-local_7.5-18_amd64.deb 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cuda

After doing this, when my computer rebooted I was met with a black screen, with no mouse cursor. To fix this, I booted into recovery mode in grub and in a root terminal, typed:

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

After doing that, I was able to boot back into a GUI (without NVIDIA drivers), however, whenever I try to install any version of the NVIDIA restricted driver or CUDA, I get the same black screen (even installing versions that worked previously) and I have to repeat the above commands to get my computer to boot again.

I have tried:

  • Installing NVIDIA 352.63 using the 'Additional Drivers' menu
  • Installing NVIDIA 352.93 using the 'Additional Drivers' menu
  • Installing NVIDIA 364 using:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install nvidia-364

  • Resetting xorg.conf

  • sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
  • sudo apt-get install nvidia-common sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
  • sudo apt-get install nvidia-modprobe nvidia-common

  • Installing CUDA 7.5 using the .deb network file without first installing drivers

  • Installing CUDA 7.5 using the .run file without first installing drivers
  • Adding nomodeset to the grub config

Since installing the drivers that previously worked no longer works, I suspect that there is something I am forgetting to reconfigure/reset prior to installing.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Best Answer

this is already answered here at askubuntu - I refer to this workaround of myself here :

How can I Install Nvidia Driver GT 520 and Cuda 5.0 in Ubuntu13.04?

You should carefully read this and follow this step by step - read this here too at nvidia :

http://www.nvidia.de/object/cuda_1_1_beta.html

This should solve your black screen into a magic screen ...

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