Everything freezes after installing CUDA. normal boot, tty and recovery mode freeze

Question

This happened after I tried to install CUDA 10.0 and the corresponding NVIDIA Graphics Driver. I already have an existing CUDA 11.5, but I needed an older version. It is worth to mention I also installed the NVIDIA graphics driver for CUDA 10.0 which might be part of the problem, as I already have graphics driver for CUDA 11.5.

The installation of CUDA 10 did not finish properly (ran all night without success) so I had to reboot the computer in an attempt to stop it. Now, the computer freezes couple of seconds after booting. I have done some troubleshooting, which include entering tty, recovery mode etc. but none of these options work, as they all freeze soon after I enter. The only things that works are the BIOS and grub. Does anyone have any clue on how to solve this?

I have a bootable usb stick, are there any options for uninstalling the CUDA 10 and / or the graphics driver by using that?

Answer 1

You can get a root shell into the system without recovery mode by using the bootable flash drive. Boot the system from the flash drive, then hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal.

Next, do "lsblk". This will show you a list of drives and partitions. You should be able to figure out which drive and partition your Ubuntu installation is on based on the drive size.

Now, mount the partition with sudo mount /dev/<partition ID here> /mnt, replacing <partition ID here> with the partition ID you found with lsblk. It should look something like sda1.

Next, run this command sequence to get a root shell with Internet access inside the Ubuntu installation:

sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf
sudo chroot /mnt

You can now run arbitrary commands as root within the installed Ubuntu system, which should hopefully allow you to fix whatever went wrong. You may need to mount additional partitions into /mnt (like /boot or /home if you have them separate), or bind-mound additional directories from the live system into /mnt for certain commands to work. However, for text editing, apt package management, and basic UNIX commands, this should be enough.