How to uninstall manually installed Nvidia drivers?

Question

How do I uninstall manually installed Nvidia drivers 310.14 and revert to Noveau. I have Ubuntu 12.10.

Solution 1

Yeap, was going to say what Karasu said. Just to add some information. If the driver you downloaded is called for example NVIDIA-Linux-x86-310.19.run then you would run:

sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-310.19.run --uninstall

If you want to get the help for your Nvidia driver then do this:

NVIDIA-Linux-x86-310.19.run --help or a more extended version for it:

NVIDIA-Linux-x86-310.19.run -A which shows you the uninstallation option:

--uninstall
  Uninstall the currently installed NVIDIA driver.

There are a couple of other nice options in case you want to use them like:

-a - Accept License
-s - Silent Mode
-q - no questions
-i - Driver information
--update - Check Nvidia site and update to the latest

For cases where you use the CUDA installer, in the documentation for it you can find more options on how to uninstall it, like this excerpt:

To uninstall the CUDA Toolkit, run the uninstallation script provided in the bin directory of the toolkit. By default, it is located in /usr/local/cuda-11.0/bin:

sudo /usr/local/cuda-11.0/bin/cuda-uninstaller

To uninstall the NVIDIA Driver, run nvidia-uninstall:

sudo /usr/bin/nvidia-uninstall

And others that can be seen when you run the --help parameter

Solution 2

First you need the installation file. Then put it in your home folder, open a terminal and type

sudo ~/installation_file.run --uninstall`

Then restart your computer and your drivers will be completely uninstalled. If Unity don't load after the uninstallation, right click --> change desktop background, then click on "All Settings" on the left-top corner of the window. Then go to Software sources and install a proprietary driver from the list.

Comments

[Luis Alvarado]

Yeap, was going to say this ^^.

[MKay]

And what if I accidentally deleted .run file?

[mrgloom]

@MKay you can download newer version of .run and it will delete older current version.

[d00d]

What if I installed the NVIDIA driver with the CUDA installer .run file? There is no --uninstall option

[Luis Alvarado]

@D.Hot If you can give me a link to the installer I can test it out here.

[d00d]

you can download the installer here: developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/10.2/Prod/…

[Luis Alvarado]

@D.Hot I added some additional feedback based on your recommendations. Yes, it looks like it defers if using CUDA. Thank you.