Drivers do not work for NVIDIA Titan Black on 14.04

[mrvlad]

Hello,

My computer with Ubuntu 14.04 x64 has a GeForce Titan Black graphics card (there is no integrated graphics module). I have encountered several problems with making this GPU work properly on Ubuntu and I would like to kindly ask you for help.

First of all, after a fresh installation (+upgrades) Ubuntu won't enter the console mode (i.e. blank black screen after pressing CTRL+ALT+F{1-6}).

The GPU is not detected in the "Additional drivers" tab of Software & Updates utility - "No additional drivers available".

I tried out several very similar instructions (like f.eg. this one) that advise the following:
1. purge nvidia, install nvidia-331-updates-dev, reboot
2. go to "Additional drivers" tab and select recommended open source driver (my list of drivers is still empty at this point, but at least now i can enter the console mode; maximum available resolution is still way too low)
3. download x64 driver 331.67 (that is supposed to support Titan Black), go to console mode, stop lightdm, apply privileges to the driver, install it
4. reboot after the installation
But this does not work. Upon rebooting I see a screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. After a while the screen goes completely black for a few seconds, then returns to the state with the blinking cursor. This process repeats forever. The system is not responsive, I can only do a hard reset and uninstall the 331.67 driver in recovery mode.

I also tried to
- install the latest NVIDIA driver 340.24 instead of 331.67
- force resolution to be monitor's native 1920x1080 (in /etc/X11/xorg.conf)
- blacklist nouveau
same result.

Ubuntu seems to see the PCI

wtf@themysterygarden:~$ lspci -v
(...)
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK110B [GeForce GTX Titan Black] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 3641
    Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 32
    Memory at fa000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
    Memory at e8000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
    Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
    I/O ports at e000 [size=128]
    Expansion ROM at fb000000 [disabled] [size=512K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
(...)

System Settings -> Details shows:

Graphics VESA: GK110B Board - 20830031

After installing nvidia-331-updates-dev:

Graphics GeForce GTX TITAN Black/PCIe/SSE2

but still the maximum resolution is 1360x768 (the monitor's native resolution is 1920x1080).

I greatly appreciate your help with this.