Black Screen on Start

[aPlayer]

Hello Mint forums, I hope I posted in the correct place my problem that I am currently facing.

I installed yesterday the latest version of Linux Mint Cinnamon. It was a clean install, I switched from Win10 to this.

Today, I changed in the driver manager my nvidia driver from the first one that was reccomended to the second one that it said in a parantesis that it's open source.

The changes were applied and my laptop froze.
I restarted my laptop and after the LM green logo, all I get is a flickering line on top left, the rest of the screen is black.

I searched on google and I did not found any solutions. I hope I do not need to reinstall my Linux because I spent 8 hours yesterday on setting up my laptop with oracle virtual machine and the VMs that I need.
I also has not done any so called snaps.

Please, explain to me like you explain to a dummy on how to revert that change.

On Windows it is much easier but on linux, I find it impossible to do it.

Thank you.

[mikeflan]

I would try live booting Linux Mint via a USB drive and then Timeshift back a day or so. Then reboot.
I believe the live boot would be with the disk or USB you installed Linux with.

A simpler solution might be to live boot Linux Mint and just go into Driver Manager and change the driver back.

[SMG]

A simpler solution might be to live boot Linux Mint and just go into Driver Manager and change the driver back.

That will not change the driver on the installed system. One can not change drivers on the hard drive by using Driver Manager on the live session.

Today, I changed in the driver manager my nvidia driver from the first one that was reccomended to the second one that it said in a parantesis that it's open source.

The changes were applied and my laptop froze.

How did it "unfreeze"? Did you happen to press the power button to shut off the computer? Doing that can corrupt files. You probably ended up with only part of the driver files installed.

I hope I do not need to reinstall my Linux because I spent 8 hours yesterday on setting up my laptop with oracle virtual machine and the VMs that I need.

Did you take any Timeshift snapshots during that process? If so, you can revert to a snapshot so you would not have to start over.

I restarted my laptop and after the LM green logo, all I get is a flickering line on top left, the rest of the screen is black.

When you restart your computer, after the BIOS/UEFI splash screen, press the Escape key repeatedly until the grub menu comes up.

In grub, select the Advanced Options. Then select a kernel number with (recovery mode) after it. That should boot you into the system using software rendering (no graphics drivers).

If you have Timeshift snapshot saved, open Timeshift and revert to a saved snapshot.

If you do not have snapshots, then please give us information about your install by entering this command in a terminal: inxi -Fxxxrz
Click </> from the mini toolbar above the textbox where you type your reply and then place your cursor between the code markers and paste the results of the command between the code markers [code]Results[/code]. This will let us know how Mint sees your hardware.

Then you should be able to open Driver Manager. I do not know what you might find in it because I'm not sure what was happening when your computer "froze", but you can see if it will let you re-install the Nvidia driver.