[Drivers] NVIDIA drivers corrupted/broken after system update (kernel update) for Ubuntu

Last Updated: Sep 15th 2025

Author: Duc Bui

Document Scope After an update that modifies your kernel header, you may find your GUI is no longer functioning. This is totally normal and expected. While losing your GUI can be frustrating, the solution is pretty simple: reinstall your graphics driver.

# Create blacklist file
echo 'blacklist nouveau' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
echo 'options nouveau modeset=0' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf

# Update initramfs
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo reboot

sudo su

Step 3: Download a new Nvidia Driver You can get the latest by searching on NVIDIA's website. Select your card from the drop-down and you will be shown the current version for your card.

For example, on the date this article was published, the current driver for the NVIDIA RTX A6000 is 580.82.09, as seen in this screenshot:

As of March 2024, NVIDIA stores all of their drivers in a very reliable structure, so as long as you know the version, you can get the file via command line by running the below wget and replacing the # with the correct version number, for example, 580.82.09:

wget https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/###.##.##/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-###.##.##.run

Step 4: Make your installer executable

root@ubuntu:/home/user# chmod +x NVIDIA*run
root@ubuntu:/home/user#

Step 5: Disable all GUI elements This step is primarily as a "just in case" there are any lingering GUI components that need to be disabled.

# Stop the display manager first (critical step)
systemctl stop gdm3 || systemctl stop lightdm || systemctl stop sddm

# Then isolate to multi-user target  
systemctl isolate multi-user.target

Step 6: Run the installer Follow the prompts here and you should be good to answer yes to anything except when prompted if you want the installer to configure nvidia-xconfig for you. Answer no to that step.

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-*.run

Step 7: Reboot You SHOULD now have a working GUI.

reboot