After updating my Ubuntu system my display was broken, I did some research and found many people were having the same problem. It seems due to the new kernel I installed the Nvidia drivers were not working correctly. After a little research and a short trial and error period I got it working again. These steps may not work for you but perhaps it will help some of you atleast.
First I had no access to a shell even when pressing CTRL+ALT+F1, if you can get shell this way just do that, I however had to ssh into my machine from another machine. If you don’t have ssh setup and don’t have shell then try to go to recovery mode in the GRUB bootloader screen.
Now that I had access to the system I investigated the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file to find this
[ 280.114] (EE)
Fatal server error:
[ 280.114] (EE) AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0
[ 280.114] (EE)
[ 280.114] (EE)
Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support
at http://wiki.x.org
for help.
[ 280.114] (EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information.
[ 280.114] (EE)
[ 280.115] (EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.
This didn’t give much clues but if you have similar logs then you may be having the same problem.
so since i had shell I did
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-331-updates
sudo reboot
If your system uses a different package manager simply look for the same package under your distro. You may need to uninstall the nvidia packages you have and then re-install them.
After the system rebooted I had my GUI back!
Hope this helps someone get their X-server back to working condition. Nvidia drivers have all sorts of problems with Linux systems from my experience. If you have troubles consider filing a bug report with Nvidia, the more people reporting problems the more likely they are to work on Linux compatibility.
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