video card problems
 

I just got a dell 830 with an academic install of xp which I partitioned with gparted freeing up half the hard drive. I installed ubuntu to free space without a hitch. I then connected to the internet and set my advanced preferences to extra. I was prompted to install nvidia driver. I downloaded and rebooted. Upon reboot where I would normally see a login screen I see a light screen that darkens with a vertical dark line of about 1.5 inches wide.

I am new to this and I was wondering if anybody had any ideas how I can first disable the video card driver I installed and help me find one that will work. I am green with text mode so please be specific with code.

System info:
intel core 2 duo cpu
t9300 @ 2.5 GHz
3.5 GB of RAM
Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M


Thank you for you help,

Michael Benton

1) From the messed up screen, hit CTRL + ALT + F1 which should bring you to a text only console.
2) login as your normal user
3) type sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg (this will run an ncurses based step by step configuration of your graphical hardware)
4) when you get to the part about Video card, select "VESA", which is the generic linux video driver.
5) When it finishes, hit CTRL + ALT + F7, which should take you back to the graphical login (which should be fixed). If not, you can hit CTRL + ALT + Backspace to restart X, or type sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart.

Once you are back at your desktop go to: System--> Administration and click on Hardware Drivers. Use that app to fetch and install the correct driver.

Well I would like to thank those who helped. I was able to disable the bad driver, thank you. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find the correct driver or there is not one for my card yet, so I did not get to solve my problem yet. Shoot any ideas to my email, thanks.