Permanently disable a driver at start up?

Hello! This is my first dumb question I’ve ever asked the linux community! I’m very new so if this is obvious, I apologize. What I’m looking to do is disable the driver for the internal pci wifi. Its an old laptop so I got a new usb wifi plugin to connect to 5GHz and speed things up. The wifi donggle works great, but I get the annoying problem of the internal wifi adapter connecting to the 2.4GHz band at the same time. I dont need the internal to work, so I want to just disable it, but even as root using modprobe -r the driver just starts up again on reboot. I can’t seem to find and uninstall the driver once disabled, but I would be content just having the system know to permanently ignore it or disable on startup each time. Drivers name is ath9k for reference

TLDR; Is there a way to automatically disable/ignore a driver on start up?

Just blacklist the module.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_module#Blacklisting

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On many laptops’ BIOS/UEFI, you can also manually disable the onboard WiFi.

Thanks! Worked perfectly!

I thought about this, but the pcie card also handles bluetooth (I think) so I didn’t want to completely disable the card, just the drivers specific to it handling wifi. I created a blacklist.conf file as described above and blacklisted the drive ath9k, the name of the wifi driver, that i found from hwinfo --wlan.

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