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After installing NVIDIA drivers I get a blank screen after grub. I've tried all remedies from related threads, such as this one, but the problem persists for me.

Edit: (Removed unneccessary clutter, added following)

If I boot into recovery mode and then select "resume normal boot", it works! How is that possible?

Based on the logs, it looks like it tries to load NVIDIA drivers from the encrypted hard drive before it is decrypted, and that is causing the error? This would also explain why booting via recovery mode works: in that case the drive is decrypted before NVIDIA drivers are loaded. I tried to install without full disk encryption and everything worked, so this is definitely related to encryption. Other people also experienced issues with full disk encryption + nvidia drivers. I tried these steps to make the password entry screen text-only, but it didn't work (I tried the steps before installing drivers and I was still seeing a graphical window for entering the password).

Also, in the successful boot I see only 1 "drm device card", but on the failed boot I see 2: 

xfree86: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card1)
xfree86: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card0)
David Foerster
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bkoodaa
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1 Answers1

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Discovered workarounds:

  • Typing password at the blank screen works
  • Booting into recovery mode and then selecting "resume normal boot" works

My issue was caused by full disk encryption. I have another machine with full disk encryption + proprietary NVIDIA drivers and it works fine. I don't know why it doesn't work on this machine, but I confirmed the cause by temporarily installing Ubuntu without encryption. I suspect this issue was caused by 1 of 2 things and I'll award +1 and accepted answer to anyone who can tell me which (and how to fix it):

  • While my screen had a signal, it may have been drawing the password entry screen to my onboard graphic chip which isn't connected to anything (see logs)
  • Or perhaps the fallback to noveau drivers failed (after trying to load NVIDIA drivers from the encrypted partition)
bkoodaa
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