12.04 LTS won't boot after nvidia driver upgrade

Question

I wanted to use the most recent nvidia-319(I think) drivers so that Steam would stop complaining about my drivers. I selected the 319 drivers in the System Hardware menu and rebooted. The system hung on reboot for several minutes so I performed a hard-shutdown. After the system came back online, it prompted me for my MySQLServer login (its never done that before). I forgot the credentials so I hard-restarted again and this time it boots to a black screen with a flashing cursor on the top left. NOTHING THAT I TYPE IS SHOWN ON SCREEN. When I hit the power button, it says various things are shutting down/stopping and then the system turns off.

My question is how can I use a LiveCD to revert this driver change? Or is there another (better) method? This is the first time that I have broken my Ubuntu in 4 years :(

Thanks in advance.

Solution

Reinstalling your drivers to the current version will solve this:

You will have to boot normally, and when the black screen appears, press ctrl+alt+F1. Login, then use the following commands.

First remove all the old drivers:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

Then reinstall the current drivers:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

Reboot, and your're good to go!

sudo reboot

Comments

[V1GG3N]

What options do I need to choose from the LiveCD to be able to gain terminal access? The flashing cursor does not show anything that I type.

[Joren]

You shouldn't do this from the live cd, but from when you boot "normally". I've updated my answer.

[V1GG3N]

This is what I get after trying to purge: E: Unable to locate package nvidia-bug-report.log.gz E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'nvidia-bug-report.log.gz' I then tried to install current, it said I was running the current version and gave me the option to remove unnecessary packages, which I did. Rebooted and same black screen with cursor.