Black screen after installing Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu 20.04

Question

The Issue

I recently updated from 18.04 (with running nvidia drivers) to 20.04. Now, after installing the nvidia drivers I get a black screen after selecting Ubuntu in the GRUB menu. At the top of the screen it is written in console style

/dev/nvme0n1p7: clean, 1479251/17219584 files, 57208401/68869632 blocks

What I tried

I tried different versions of installation like

• sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
• sudo apt install nvidia-driver-440
• sudo apt install nvidia-driver-390
• using the Software&Updates -> Additional Drivers GUI
• launch Ubuntu from bootable USB and try boot-repair

All resulted in the same behaviour / didn't help.

To revert the changes I can do Ctrl+Shift+F6 which gives me a prompt, login with username and passwort and do

sudo dpkg -P $(dpkg -l | grep nvidia-driver | awk '{print $2}')
sudo apt autoremove
reboot

which gives me a proper login screen again - without nvidia drivers obviously.

My System

ubuntu-drivers devices yields

vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
model    : GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M] (XPS 15 9550)
driver   : nvidia-driver-435 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-390 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-440 - distro non-free recommended
driver   : nvidia-driver-440-server - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-418-server - distro non-free
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

I run Ubuntu 20.04 / Windows 10 dual boot.

Answer 1

Sort of a Solution

Rather than relying on the system which I got from doing an upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04, I did a complete fresh re-install of Ubuntu 20.04 and now everything seems to work. I did update the drivers via "Software&Updates" in the Additional Drivers tab.