Ubuntu won't boot at all after removing NVIDIA v. 173 driver

[ekortright]

Upgraded my Dell Inspiron 5150 from Ubuntu 9.x to 11.04. Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200.

When upgrade complete, got message about graphics not supporting unity, but the classic view seemed fine.

However, the computer would never come back from a Suspend/Sleep, however. It seemed to hang with a black screen and I would have to force it to power down by holding the power button.

After that, when starting up I would sometimes see all kinds of garbage on the screen and the machine would appear to hang. I could reboot in recovery mode, but still I would see garbage on the screen. By guessing that the recovery menu was being displayed, I could drop into a root shell and type the "reboot" command (without being able to see the characters) and the machine would usually come back up OK.

I checked the "Additional Drivers" and the NVIDIA v. 173 driver was reported as "enabled but not in use". To see if I could fix the garbage screens by using the generic video driver, I removed the NVIDIA 173 driver and restarted.

Now I cannot boot at all (recovery or normal). I get a series of messages on the screen, the last one of which says: "[ 27.959750] fb: conflicting fb hw usage nouveaufb vs EFI VGA - removing generic driver". The machine hangs after that.

I cannot even boot a previous version of Linux; I always get the same message now.

The video used to work fine with previous versions of Ubuntu. Is it just that Ubuntu 11 is just not compatible with older hardware?

[webofunni]

mount ubuntu partition in another os/livecd and add the EFI VGA in black list

[ekortright]

mount ubuntu partition in another os/livecd and add the EFI VGA in black list

Thanks, but can you tell me how to do that?

I can edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add a line "blacklist xxx", but what is the name to use in place of "xxx" for EFI VGA? I can't seem to find anything on the web about how to do this.

[webofunni]

Try this. Reboot the machine. In the grub screen press "e" ( letter e ) to edit it.

go to the line that looks like

linux	/vmlinuz-2.6.38-8-generic root=/dev/mapper/ubuntu--server-root ro   quiet

and change that to

linux	/vmlinuz-2.6.38-8-generic root=/dev/mapper/ubuntu--server-root ro acpi=off

press F10 to boot.

[ekortright]

This lets me log into the system, but no X Windows.

[ekortright]

Also, trying to boot normally seems to write invalid data to the graphics card, so that even if I do get the login prompt I get garbage on the screen (my original problem), so that I can't see what I'm doing.

I have to boot to Windows (it's a dual boot) or using the live CD to get the graphics card back to normal again.

[ekortright]

Well, I figured life's too short to spend it trying to figure this problem out, so I blew away my old installation of Ubuntu (9.x upgraded to 11.04).

So . . .

The computer boots fine with the installation CD. Video looks good.

Told it to replace the existing 11.04 with a fresh install.

After installation, asked to restart; removed CD and let it restart.

1. Displayed the background after a while.
2. A long time passed without any login screen, then it started flashing some window that looked like the upgrade manager, but it flickered so much that I could not see very well. It was as if the monitor refresh rate was wrong.
3. I pressed Alt-Ctrl-F1 to try to log in and shutdown manually, but never saw a prompt. Instead, after a while it went back into X and displayed the login screen.
4. Logged in, but never got the window manager. The disk kept working, and the fan came on. This went on for several minutes.
5. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and the machine restarted.

The attached screen shot is what I get after rebooting.

[drdos2006]

Here is how I solved my nvidia problem.

Switch off machine, remove nvidia card....nVidia Corporation G73 [GeForce 7600 GT] (rev a1)
Boot with vga monitor on onboard vga output
Remove : sudo rm /usr/lib/extra-modules/nvidia.so
Shutdown, reinstall video card, re-install nvidia driver

regards

[ekortright]

I also tried booting in recovery mode.

I get a login prompt, but the screen is still garbage.

Not sure if this means anything, but all the characters I type at the terminal are reversed left-to-right, and look like an outline rather than a solid character.

What could be messing up my graphics card, that would survive a completely fresh installation?

[webofunni]

Are you able to boot in to the live cd ? In that case a fresh installation will work.