Blank screen at boot after Nvidia driver update to version 361-28-23.1

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I suspect that an automatic update of the Nvidia driver from version 352.79 to 361-28-23.1 led to the fact that I am now unable to login after boot (stalled system with a black screen with a cursor in the left upper corner). Turning to text mode after stall does not yield any significant hint, at least to me.
My graphics card is a GeForce GTX970 (desktop pc) and the linux kernel is up to date (3.16.7-35.1).
The system is able to boot in recovery mode and the closest I could get to a “normal” boot is by appending “x11failsafe” in the boot menu. Appending only “nomodeset” does not work neither (blank screen, too).
Comparing the output of “journalctl” for 2 boots with and without using “x11failsafe” does not reveal any significant difference, unless I am missing something important.
Do you think there might be a compatibility issue between the new Nvidia driver and my system (I know it’s a vague question …)?
Actually, I was about to manually reinstall the previous version of the driver but this does not seem to be recommended at all since the drivers provided by the community repository “Nvidia Graphics Drivers” should be best suited with the latest OpenSuse distributions.
Does any of you have a suggestion about how to proceed in order to fix this?

Thank you very much in advance!

2

yes bad update package for GO4 flavour driver. It is not clear it if a new correct one will be released

The work around is to completely uninstall the driver then reinstall. This can be done in the command line version of yast

3

Maybe post #22 here https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/514035-NVIDIA-GTX-980-Driver-problem might help you too.

4

That perfectly did the trick! :slight_smile: Thanks a lot for your help!

5

Thanks a lot for your reply. I thought I had made an extensive search about any related topic. Apparently it was not the case …
Anyway, I solved my problem by following the suggestion from gogalthorp’s reply.

In case it might be useful for someone else, here is what I did:

  1. boot using x11failsafe mode in the boot menu
  2. Uninstall the following packages in Yast:

nvidia-computeG04
nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-default
nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-desktop
nvidia-glG04
x11-video-nvidiaG04

  1. reboot in “normal” mode until stall and enter text mode (CTRL-ALT-F1)
  2. login as root and run Yast in command line
  3. reinstall all above packages and reboot

At least, that did the trick for me …

6

Thanks for sharing your workaround.