Hello,

I hope that this is the right place for this query as I think it is more software than hardware related.

I am running Mint 11 on a machine with an NVIDIA GE Force9500 GT graphics card. I recently replaced the graphics driverthat was installed when I first installed Mint 11 with one that was recommended in the extra drivers section in Mint. This is called NVIDIA 173. I did this because it appears to be the same driver that drives this card in Ubuntu 11.04 and allows the user to make full use of the card.

Having chosen "Activate" in the extra driver menu and then rebooted I found that I got a list of what was being loaded which stopped when it reached "Checking battery", and then the machine hung.

I rebooted and selected the recovery option and in the menu that appeared I selected "Repair broken packages" followed by "Normal boot". This time I did not get a desktop but was able to log into my account so I typed 'sudo startx' but got the following error messages:

"Failed to load "module "nv" (module does not exist,0)
NVIDIA (0): Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!
NVIDIA(0): ***Aborting***
Screen(s) found but none have usable configuration
Fatal server error:
no screens found"

Could someone help by telling mew how to uninstall the NVIDIA 173 driver and revert back to the Linux default driver?

9500GT should work with 173.XX drivers, but only just...and I wouldnt trust it with the 173.XX drivers. It should be using 'nvidia-current' drivers, not nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx. nVidia-current is driver version 180.XX+, the newest released version is 295.20.

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

That should remove all the nVidia junk and let you boot back up to the desktop.

Thanks for your message received today cascade9. I had been trying everything for over a week to get my graphics card working properly and got so frustrated when none of the things I found by googling worked, that yesterday I deleted the partition containing Mint 11. I may re-install it in a couple of months when Mint 13 is available. Hopefully, I won't have this trouble then, but who knows?

If you try it again, make sure you try nvidia-current, not the nvidia 173.XX drivers.