How to solve a silly mistake .... (nVidia driver)

[Spinner912]

I have just installed 64Bit Mint 18.2 alongside 32Bit 18.1. No big deal here. It installed perfectly and booted up as it should. But the video driver did not recognise the monitor (as it normally doesn't it seems) and I was only able to view a distorted incorrect resolution on the display.

Having had this problem with an earlier install of 18.1, I figured I knew the answer. The nVidia driver. So I elected to install the recommended driver. B-I-G mistake.

I knew that Nvidia 340 did not work with my older GT240, and to make the earlier 18.1 version work, I had to use the legacy driver, 304.

But from some crazy sudden rush of blood to the head, I failed to reason that if 340 didn't work previously with the GT240, it probably wouldn't work this time either. Well; you guessed it, it didn't.

Now, using whatever boot method I try - nomodeset or Recovery, booting continues normally until some undefinable point before the login screen, and it then goes into repeating many line of no IRQ .... repeating about every 5 seconds, and each repeat becoming longer than the previous. It will,continue like this for as long as I leave it. Stopping it can only be done by a hardware hard reboot.

What have I done (apart from something stupid) and how can I recover from it?

[WharfRat]

Spinner912,

From what I understand you can't boot to the 64Bit Mint 18.2 even in recovery mode.

What you will have to do is boot to the 64Bit Mint 18.2 installation media then chroot to your installed system to remove the nvidia driver.

Or since this is a fairly new installation, just reinstall the 64Bit Mint

[Spinner912]

@WharfRat: Thank you for those suggestions. I am not familiar with the first, but if you could detail how to go about doing that I would certainly like to give it a try for educational purposes if nothing else. If that doesn't work, then I will go to suggestion #2.

You are correct; it is a brand new installation with nothing having been done other than installing the obviously incorrect driver.

[WharfRat]

This will have to be done from the 64Bit Mint 18.2 installation media as you cannot chroot from a 32Bit to a 64Bit system

Open the teminal application and enter

Code: Select all

sudo -i

Change the '?' here to your broken mint partition and enter the following one line at a time.

Code: Select all

mount /dev/sda? /mnt 
mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
mount --rbind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --rbind /dev /mnt/dev
/usr/sbin/chroot /mnt /bin/bash
source /etc/profile
echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" >> /etc/resolv.conf
export PS1="\[\033[1;33m\]chroot to ->\[\033[1;31m\](system) #\[\e[0m\] "

Once you're chrooted you can follow viewtopic.php?f=49&t=257067 to get back to the nouveau driver.

[jimallyn]

<offtopic> When I saw this one last night I assumed that chroot was the way to do it, but didn't know enough about it to suggest it: I wouldn't have been able to describe in detail what to do. Bookmarking this to study later. Thanks, WharfRat! </offtopic>