Need to deactivate NVIDIA driver from recovery mode or using Ubuntu 12.04 install disk

Question

I tried switching graphics drivers from 317 to 304(post-release) because it kept crashing when I wanted to move my monitor's display to the other side of the laptop display (using NVIDIA Settings)

Now Ubuntu won't boot at all. It just crashes and leaves a blinking cursor but I can't type anything.

I want to switch the graphics driver back to the old one using recovery mode or the Ubuntu install disk so I can boot again. How can I do this?

Solution

I figured it out

From recovery mode, select networking. That will also mount the disk

Then I can enter a root shell and

apt-get remove --purge nvidia*

After rebooting, I was able to

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

And that one seems to work fine.

Comments

[themhz]

worked for ubuntu 14.04. Thank you <3

[Philippe Gachoud]

To avoid DNS problem I had to add to /etc/hosts the ip of servers ?echo "91.189.91.24 security.ubuntu.com" >> /etc/hosts echo "91.189.91.24 archive.ubuntu.com" >> /etc/hosts

[Isura Manchanayake]

Worked for 16.04. Thanks