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I selected one of the alternative NVIDIA drivers on my Sony Vaio from the Additional Drivers application. That ruined my installation and all I get is the login prompt at bootup.

However I can go in at bootup by selecting "Older Ubuntu Versions" and selecting whatever was there before. This older version has the correct drivers (NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver 173) which I'm using right now.

Is there file in the "new" (broken) system where I can replace the NVIDIA driver entry from the "old" system I'm using (which works fine) without having to reinstall UBUNTU from scratch? Or can I reinstall UBUNTU without losing all my files and settings? or what are my alternatives?

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1 Answer 1

You can probably just remove the nvidia-current package which broke your system and then install the nvidia-173 package:

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-current
sudo apt-get install nvidia-173
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Thanks Ugo. It worked beautifully. Just to be a bit more verbose for newbies like me, I REBOOTED THE MACHINE. GOT THE LOGIN PROMPT. LOGGED IN AS MYSELF (WITH PRIVILEGES) TYPED AS YOU RECOMMENDED sudo apt-get remove nvidia-current sudo apt-get install nvidia-173 REBOOTED AND VOILA! It worked!! –  user89049 Sep 14 '12 at 0:09
Happy to help. Can you select the answer as the good answer to close the thread? Cheers. –  Ugo Sep 17 '12 at 7:33

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