Bad video driver installed- how to get rid of it?

Question

I had good running system of v10.04 Ubuntu on my old Acer TravelMate 630 laptop (about 8 years old) for months. Then I upgraded to v11.10 via Update manager and it went like charm. After that, I played with system tweaking, just trivial things like screensaver lock and wallpaper, until I "discovered" the option "Adding hardware driver" or something like that.

I let Ubuntu scan my system and it came back with a proprietary, but recommended Nvidia driver. Since my video play and flash rich sites was terribly slow, I hoped to get any improvement by installing something else than generic video driver.

Yes, I thought of my very old Nvidia Mobile2Go graphic card and 2GHz Pentium 4 as possible reason for not very responsive machine, but...

Anyhow, I let the system update my graphic card driver and it turned out it was a big mistake. After reboot I could not get into my X server anymore. Furthermore, I cannot get to text console neither. Only scrambled screen.

I can get into text console only trough the GRUB, by pressing shift.

I read a lot of postings in other forums about similar issues, tried many possible solutions, but none gave relief. I suppose, the main problem is, that I have only wireless Internet connection on my laptop and that is not active when I am in GRUB. I got to console after GRUB, but no command worked in it. In other words, I don't have got the Internet connection when I am in text console.

One thing more, I can start Live CD without any problem, but don't know what then.

Please, before I install the whole system from the scratch only because of failure of bad video card driver, could anybody tell me how could I get rid of that bad driver without new install?

Thanks very much in advance!

Solution

Well, sometimes switching to console (STRG-ALT-F1) and X (ALT-F7) several times helps to unscramble the console. Then you can do "sudo apt-get remove nvidia*" and it will remove the proprietary drivers. Sometimes you will also have to remove the xorg.conf in /etc/X11: sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf Then reboot and it should work.

Comments

[nilsonneto]

Try this answer here to see if it resolves your scrambled graphics issue: askubuntu.com/questions/38780/…

[Bruno Pereira]

If you want to get rid of your nvidia drivers follow this, the first 2 lines will get rid of the driver and the 4th will reconfigure your X, the 3rd will re-install xorg and there is a chance it can be skipped. Have a look.

[Vladimixx]

Many thanks guys, I will give it a try for sure! I will be back with the result.

[Vladimixx]

Well, unfortunately, nothing helped. @ fossfreedom Your suggestion didn't worked at all. @brunopereira81: Neither this worked for me. I get error message "unknown command 'sudo'". I can generally say, no command at grub> prompt works for me. Somehow, no command is available there. Have no clue what should I do further. Just always scrambled screen. Any more idea? Thank you a lot anyway!

[Bruno Pereira]

what you need to do is press shift right after your BIOS post (and keep it pressed), there will be a menu (grub) asking you what to boot, select recovery mode, after boot select Drop to root shell prompt and follow the guide I showed you to remove your pesky drivers.

[ImaginaryRobots]

you might want to split this up into multiple responses, since you have 2 different solutions here (removing packages and cleaning up logfiles).

[Lekensteyn]

sudo apt-get remove nvidia* removes more than just drivers (i.e. it removes nvidia-common too). Use sudo apt-get remove nvidia-current instead (and sudo apt-get remove nvidia-173 nvidia-96 if you have installed other, older drivers).