Messed up the drivers and now can only run in fallback mode

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MaGiC

Messed up the drivers and now can only run in fallback mode

Post by MaGiC »

Hi. I recently had a problem with Steam and figured that I should reinstall my Nvidia driver. I have done many things and now when I boot normally, my screen freezes. When I run in recovery mode, it shows an error message saying that Cinnamon has crashed and is now running in fallback mode. I may have messed up the drivers quite a bit because when I ran the Driver Manager it said that I was using an alternative, manually installed driver and wouldn't let me change it to nouveau or nvidia-384. Then I tried to install the Nvidia driver once more and it currently shows as nvidia-384 is selected. But still I can't boot normally and can only use fallback mode even in recovery mode.

I tried to reconfigure my Nvidia driver multiple times and used autoremove at some point to delete a few packages (when I tried to remove nvidia-284 it said that it wasn't installed). Then I downloaded a file named "NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.77.run" from Nvidia's website and disabled x server in order to install it. At installation it asked me if it should configure Nvidia xconfig to start the x server in boot and I said no. After that I tried to boot normally it froze in a black screen(not pitch black) and started blinking every few seconds. I am using the computer from fallback mode ever since and I still can't boot normally. It doesn't blink anymore, just freezes.

If there was a way that I could reset the drivers back to whatever they were, that would be great. Because I think I might have messed up the nouveau too. Please help me fix it.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
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Joe2Shoe
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Re: Messed up the drivers and now can only run in fallback mode

Post by Joe2Shoe »

OpenGL & Mesa upgrades will cause a "fallback mode" on one of my laptops. I must use OpenGL v1.4, upgrading to v2.1+ fubars the laptop.
"Tolerance is the refuge of men without conviction."
"Common sense is not so common" - Voltaire
MaGiC

Re: Messed up the drivers and now can only run in fallback mode

Post by MaGiC »

I gave up and formatted my file system. Even now I cannot login. It just gives a black screen with cursor after I type my password. It is driving me crazy.

Edit: I can log in normally now but still, I had to reinstall my entire system because of a driver. Anyway, I don't need immediate help any more but I still wonder why all of that happened.
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