Tried to update nvidia driver, system boots to black screen with no tty access. Chroot went black as well

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1

Hello,

I wanted to play the new juicy Cyberpunk 2077 and found I had to update my nvidia drivers from 450xx to 455xx.

I tried to do this in the terminal (i am using an architect install).

hardware: ryzen 5 3600, nvidia 1660 ti

I am using the 5.8 kernel, but I believe I also have 5.4 installed, though the live usb I am chrooting from seems to have 5.6…

I tried to run something like ‘sudo pacman -S nvidia-455xx’ and found I could do a system update so I did (its been a while and ive just moved, it was kinda big). probably was a little too hasty here.

after this I tried to install the new nvidia driver again and rebooted.

on reboot, I go straight to a black screen. I think it has to do with X and the kernel/driver versions. I select the partition in BIOS, it seems to ‘boot’(fans sound normal) but no output on screen. I could not even switch tty with ‘Ctrl + Alt + f2/3/4/5’

I downloaded the architect iso trying to chroot into system and uninstall the old nvidia driver and replace it. I saw I had both installed (450xx and 455xx) and i ran ‘sudo mhwd -r pci video-nvidia-450xx’ and then immediately ‘sudo mhwd -a pci nonfree 0300’ (I think this was wrong too according to manjaro forum :frowning:

It seemed to uninstall the 450xx driver just fine but when I installed the 455xx driver, the screen went blank again in chroot.

I have removed the 455xx driver and added the 450xx driver. ‘pacman -Ss | grep nvidia’ shows me a bunch of drivers still but mhwd -li shows me just video-linux and 455xx driver. all of this in chroot, closely following link posted above. I still do not get any screen output after selecting partition in bios

there seems to be no way to access my system outside of chroot.

What can I do to safely fix these mistakes? I want to not be so hasty and make sure I am doing the right thing.

2

Hi @dddonehoo :wink:

  1. Remove all nvidia drivers:
mhwd -r pci  video-nvidia-450xx
mhwd -r pci  video-nvidia-455xx
  1. Keep sure really everything has been removed:
pamac list --installed | grep nvidia | grep -v mhwd
  1. Check the Xorg.conf files:
ls /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

if there is a nvidia or mhwd one, better remove it or move it to another place.
4) Install the driver cleanly:

mhwd -i pci video-nvidia-455xx

That should fix it if you are on stable branch.

1 Like
3

Hello,
I tried this and I am still getting a black screen on boot. The only thing that stuck out in the process is a modprobe error. It says it cant find the module ‘nvidia-drm’ in the modules folder for the 5.6 kernel, I only have the 5.4 and 5.8 kernels installed but the live usb seems to be using 5.6. Could this be a problem?

4

ah, I think i found more important information!
In the xorg log it says it is unable to initialize the nvidia kernel module.
When I try to run ‘sudo modprobe nvidia’ its looking in the 5.6 kernel directory, becuase the uname -r command in chroot returns that. I think it should be looking in the kernel directories of the host right? Can I initialize kernel modules from chroot?

5

That is an old ISO. Use the latest one.
5.6 and 5…8 kernels are EOL (end of life). Install 5.9 kernel from TTY and boot from it.
sudo mhwd-kernel -i linux59