Machine specs:
I7-4790K
Asus Z97-pro motherboard
Nvidia GTX 970
Steps:
1) Created a fresh install of Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon onto a USB stick
2) Machine when booting from the USB stick would show just a black screen. Work around, remove the GTX 970 and use the onboard graphics.
3) Installed LM 18.3 onto a hard drive erasing everything.
4) reboot
5) Installed all the updates
6) shutdown
7) Reinstalled the GTX 970

9) From the Driver Manager install the Recommend Nvidia 384 driver.
10) Reboot
11) I can’t remember but I would either get a Cinnamon error and a message that told me that I was using CPU graphics or something like that.
12) Issues is that the 384 drivers won’t load. AT this point everything is up to date.
Things that I have tried:
1) Going back to the (nouveau) driver from the Driver Manager, reboot, things work.
2) Removing all of the Nvidia drivers (sudo apt-get purge nvidia*), reboot, try to reinstall different Nvidia drivers. Nothing working
I also tried this on another machine with a GTX 660TI and same type of issues where the driver won’t load.
Anyone know the solution? I think an update broke the Nvidia drivers. The reason why I was trying to install in that my Linux Mint crashed and I was getting a black screen at boot up. I thought it was something that I did to the system so I thought that it might be best to just do a clean install again. But no, the install won’t work. Help please!!