How to boot to a terminal from a black screen and flashing cursor after updating the NVIDA graphics driver

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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...

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

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