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RonJohn
Asked: 2020-11-28 18:49:33 +0800 CST

Nvidia binary driver backwards compatibiiity?

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I'm about to replace an old GeForce 210 card with a slightly less old GT 730 card (don't laugh: they're fanless and meet my needs).

The 210 requires the 340.xx driver, while the 730 requires the 390.xx driver.

Which should I upgrade first: the driver or the card?

Or should I boot to the console after upgrading the card and then install linux-modules-nvidia-390-generic?

xorg drivers nvidia 18.04 nvidia-geforce

1 Answers

  1. Well, generally best practice when performing a significant hardware swap is to do a clean installation of the operating system.

    That being said, if you're really averse to the idea, you might not have to.

    You'll want to purge the existing drivers and their configs, then physically swap out the card, then install the appropriate drivers for the new graphics card.

    To avoid issues, you will want to prevent the desktop environment from loading and complete these tasks from a command line environment:

    1. Drop to a root shell prompt from GRUB:

      • Reboot your computer and from GRUB select "Advanced Options for Ubuntu"

        If GRUB does not come up on your system automatically, hit Enter after turning on your device to bring it up (for UEFI systems)

      • Select a kernel option with "recovery mode".

      • Toggle "Enable networking", otherwise the file system will be mounted read-only.

      • Select "Drop to root shell prompt"

      • Press Enter

    Be extremely careful because you are now root.

    1. Update your packages and purge your current NVIDIA driver. (Replace nvidiadriverpackage with the name of the package for your current driver)

       apt update
 apt upgrade
 apt purge nvidiadriverpackage

      Purge will remove all dependencies and it will also remove configuration files. Make sure that you review the output and note if any other packages will be removed as dependencies.

    2. Shutdown your system with shutdown -h now

    3. Physically change out the GPU.

    4. Follow the instructions again from step one to get to a root shell prompt.

    5. Install the recommended driver package for your GPU:

       apt update
 apt install nvidiadriverpackage

    6. reboot. You can now boot normally.

      If this procedure was not successful; fall back to best practice and reinstall the operating system cleanly from external installation media.

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