rescue after failed nvidia driver install? restore nouveau or basic video driver?

[Icm76]

After several failed attempts to install nvidia hardware drivers that resulted in an unusable system, I've been wondering if there is an easy way to get back the system without having to reinstall entirely? The guide on this forum is great: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204752 but inevitably there seem to be teething troubles. So if the nvidia driver install has gone awry, is it possible to edit grub or use a LiveCD to access the installed system and edit some other config file to restore nouveau?

[PhillyFloyd]

You don't need a resuce CD, boot into run-level 3 or change virtual terminals once X fails to start, then you can login as root and move /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/OLD-xorg.conf and run startx, that should get you to an X session

Unless you really need the nvidia libglx.a and openGL calls, use the RPMfusion/livna nvidia drivers, they install from a repo, and you don't have to do any interventions when updating the kernel etc

[wt6g]

This does not always work. You also need to check blacklist.conf to make sure that the nouveau driver is not blacklisted. You probably also need to reinstall the nouveau driver.

at boot time hit a
then type init 3 to get you to a terminal prompt
switch to root
yum install xorg-x11-drv-nouveau.i686

At this point, if you have renamed xorg.conf to something else as above, then X should start.

/Len

[GoinEasy9]

These are the steps I use to clean up after a bad nvidia install:
su
yum remove kmod-nvidia*
yum remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia*
rm /etc/X11/xorg*
rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
then reboot

That should bring you back into the default open source drivers.

edit: I remove all xorg files because livna-display-settings leave a backup that seems to take the place of a missing xorg. I don't know if that's completely accurate, but I did notice that effect once.

[bodhi.zazen]

Originally Posted by Icm76

After several failed attempts to install nvidia hardware drivers that resulted in an unusable system, I've been wondering if there is an easy way to get back the system without having to reinstall entirely? The guide on this forum is great: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204752 but inevitably there seem to be teething troubles. So if the nvidia driver install has gone awry, is it possible to edit grub or use a LiveCD to access the installed system and edit some other config file to restore nouveau?

There is some variation and it depends a little on exactly what system changes you made.

Here is a post where I outlined what I did

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...postcount=1002

The post shortly after mine also has some good advice from leigh123linux

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...postcount=1006

[wormhit]

Thanks GoinEasy9 !

I have installed bad Catalyst drivers, so following your example the same thing for ati catalyst:

su
yum remove kmod-catalyst*
yum remove xorg-x11-drv-catalyst*
rm /etc/X11/xorg*
rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
then reboot

[thesun]

Along these same lines, I followed Leigh123's Nvidia driver setup to the letter only to (dooh!) forget that it's for F16, 15, and 14. Not FC13. I now get a boot that freezes with a white line at the bottom of the screen and obviously X is not starting up.

My question is whether I'm better off scrapping this and trying to restore the original stuff or whether I can do a few quick steps to fix this and be off and running. My original intent was to get GLX working -- everything was fine in a new graphics card (Nvidia GeForce GTX 570) but GLX/OpenGL wasn't working...and so I thought "time to update the drivers."

I probably could live without GLX but would love to have it working.

Any suggestions would be great. Also, can someone find the Nvidia for FC13 links? They used to be here but now I'm not finding them anymore...Leigh123's instructions are fantastic but I'm not quite sure I want to upgrade to FC16 just yet.

Again, thank you for any and all help!

[sonoran]

The F13 akmod-nvidia drivers are still available:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/se...y=akmod-nvidia

RPMFusion still has an F14 repo, you might consider upgrading to at least that.

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by thesun

Along these same lines, I followed Leigh123's Nvidia driver setup to the letter only to (dooh!) forget that it's for F16, 15, and 14. Not FC13. I now get a boot that freezes with a white line at the bottom of the screen and obviously X is not starting up.

My question is whether I'm better off scrapping this and trying to restore the original stuff or whether I can do a few quick steps to fix this and be off and running. My original intent was to get GLX working -- everything was fine in a new graphics card (Nvidia GeForce GTX 570) but GLX/OpenGL wasn't working...and so I thought "time to update the drivers."

I probably could live without GLX but would love to have it working.

Any suggestions would be great. Also, can someone find the Nvidia for FC13 links? They used to be here but now I'm not finding them anymore...Leigh123's instructions are fantastic but I'm not quite sure I want to upgrade to FC16 just yet.

Again, thank you for any and all help!

I'm not sure the f13 rpmfusion nvidia driver version is new enough for your card.

This guide should work well for f13

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=234595

[JohnVV]

thesun you do know that this is an old thread from 2009
and that fedora 13 is a dead version .

fedora 13 has not been updated in 6+months and NEVER will.
please stay current and install fedora 16
if you are NOT going to stay current then DO NOT USE FEDORA
RHEL6 might be a better choice - it has a 5 year life span VS the 13 month of fedora

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by leigh123linux

I'm not sure the f13 rpmfusion nvidia driver version is new enough for your card.

This guide should work well for f13

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=234595

It should work

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Li...rtedchips.html

[thesun]

@leigh123linux: thanks so much, that thread DID work beautifully. Since I probably will upgrade to FC16 at some point soon (fresh install) I didn't bother with akmod, though I usually prefer that method.

Thanks to all for the suggestions/help!