I’m aware that this is apparently a fairly common problem and I’ve been looking to find a fix that works for me, but so far everything that’s been suggested in other answers hasn’t worked.
My system: I have a dual boot home built computer so Ubuntu is booting from it’s own hard drive and then Windows boots from the other hard drives. It has a GTX 1070 graphics card. Ideally, I would like to just revert to an older version of the Nvidia drivers since that version has been working for the past 3 months without issue. I can’t remember the old driver number, though. I want to say it was Nvidia-423? I know the version that I updated to, the one that’s failing, is Nvidia-430. I’m running Ubuntu 16.04.
The Issue: I followed the instructions on this page. There was no “metapackage from nvidia-driver” in Software and Updates so I just skipped that and then followed the commands starting at “sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa” and ending with “sudo apt install Nvidia-430”.
It appeared to install correctly until I restarted the computer to let the changes take effect. So far, the steps have been very reproducible on restart. It will open the Grub menu just fine. If I then just hit enter on Ubuntu to start, it will open the Ubuntu load screen, get 1 bubble in and then both of my screens go black (so the second screen IS getting graphics information that’s telling it to go black, it is definitely receiving signal). My main screen also has the blinking white dash in the top left corner. If I then shut down the computer, the Ubuntu load screen will come back and the computer shuts down. While in the black screen, I’ve tried ctrl+alt+F1 and ctrl+alt+F2 and nothing happens. If I try to type, nothing appears on the screen. I’ve tried adding “nomodeset quiet splash” by pressing e in the Grub menu and there is no change. I’ve also tried adding “nouveau.modeset=0” to the end of the linux line and still no change.
I think that if I can somehow get into a command line somewhere, I can follow the other answers and uninstall Nvidia and then work to reinstall an older, working version again and I bet it will work just perfectly. For some reason, though, I can’t get to the command line like all the other answers seem to be able to do. I should also mention that I’m using Ubuntu to run GROMACS for research purposes and there’s a bunch of valuable trajectories on the hard drive so a clean install of Ubuntu is not something I’d like to do.
