slackware64-14.2
Nvidia GTX 970

Downloaded latest nvidia driver and after install attempt I cannot boot system. After powering on it will boot text for about 7 seconds and turn black and proceed no further.
Can someone please help me?

I suspect that you can boot to a Live CD of something and fix it, but I have no experience with Nvidia and can't offer a HOWTO.

I suspect though, that those who can help will likely want to know where you got the Nvidia driver. Was it from Slackbuilds.org or from somewhere else? It might also help to know the make/model of the computer, in addition to that of the video card.

I'm running current but have a GTX 970. Which driver did you install? I used the NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-450.80.02.run file and it went without a hitch. As frankbell said above, boot a live DVD like Knoppix and that will get you in to have a look at the problem and pertinent log files to see what happened.

A common way of installing the proprietary driver is to do it via SBo. But if you search for "nvidia" there, as in http://slackbuilds.org/result/?search=nvidia&sv=14.2 you'll see there's a couple of different versions. The latest nvidia driver version doesn't necessarily support ALL older models, so you might need to use an older version - one of those tagged "legacy" there.

Your best bet is to go to NVidia forums and ask which version of the driver works with your hardware. And it's better to post the relevant info from the output of lspci rather than just the model, I believe there are models with same name but slightly different technical specs. You can gather that data like this:

as root of course.

Meanwhile you can revert to the nouveau driver by booting from a live CD/DVD/USB, mounting the filesystem and doing the changes.

PS: any chance that you installed the proprietary driver but did not blacklist the nouveau driver?

@FlinchX - The proprietary .run installer tells you if nouveau is present and offers to try to blacklist it. That is not the problem.

@RitaG - What you are experiencing, the blank screen, is simply what happens when modesetting begins during the boot process but the mode has not been set appropriately in your bootloader. This is quite common with LILO where the video option is set to "normal" instead of an exact resolution the card and driver understand OR if an option isn't added in "/etc/lilo.conf" such as....

Slackware's "/etc/lilo.conf.example" will give you resolution names to choose from or just use nomodeset. Problem solved (most likely by far)

1 members found this post helpful.

thank you all for replies.
i tried installing a few different drivers (from nvidia website) but i get the same 'error' every time.
ERROR: Unable to load the kernel module ‘nvidia.ko’

Can you show us how you installed these drivers (copy the actual commands you executed here in a reply, wrapping those in CODE tags for better legibility).

boot_
logged in as root
cd /home/rp
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-450.80.02.run

edit:
. . after disabling nouveau first and booting with slackware install USB

Did you chroot into the hard install? If not, AFAIK, the installer will try to install to the running kernel (which is on the USB)? I could be way off the mark because I am confused since initially your problem was blank screen, from which you couldn't see to run the installer.

So can you clear this up? Did you use the installer's first CLI stop and use "huge.s root=/dev/foo" to get to Runlevel 3? I think you are better off using the installer recovery boot to edit your bootloader to either set an appropriate resolution or nomodeset so you no longer go blank screen.

I did a reinstall.
Nothing seems to work. Can someone please give me a step by stepto do this? Or a link?

Can you boot into runlevel 3 at least?

EDIT: I've done my share of bad proprietary nvidia driver upgrades, but I haven't fouled it up in a while. If you can boot into the text console, we can ask you to run certain commands and tell us the output.

The installer replaces a bunch of shared libraries and it can be entertaining to undo that.

I did a reinstall, so I'm on the desktop (KDE) now.

Glad to hear that you were able to fix it! What I was going to say was...

Yeah I've had this happen to me. In those cases, I would try to get my system up well enough to uninstall the drivers: using the "nvidia-uninstall" script that comes with the SBo packages, or using the "--uninstall" flag with the official NVidia installer.

Sorry . .
I meant reinstall slackware.
I still need to install nvidia driver, but I need someone to help me because I can't do it without screwing everything up.
I need a step by step walkthrough, or a link to one.