How do I rescue from bad Nvidia Drivers?

[Jonny88]

Help!
I've accidently locked myself out of the GUI by installing Nvidia drivers which (obviously) had spme sort of problem with my system. The drivers were from the official repository, and installed with Yast. How do I revert my system back to my old Nvidia drivers (installed in a command promt) or at least get my GUI back so I can try and fix/salvage what I can?

[techieMoe]

Can you get to a command prompt? If so, you can change your video driver to the generic "vesa" driver, which will give you a non-3D-accelerated graphical interface from which you can attempt to fix things. To do this you'll need to edit the xorg.conf file, which is located in the /etc/X11/ directory. Log in as root user:

su <enter>
Password: <your root password, then enter>

Now open up the file in a text editor:

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down toward the bottom and look for a section similar to this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Nvidia Geforce 4"
    Driver      "nvidia"

Change the Driver line from whatever it says to say "vesa" instead.

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Nvidia Geforce 4"
    Driver      "vesa"

Now exit with CTRL+X, answering yes when it asks to save the changes. Finally, try restarting your X Windows graphical desktop with the startx command.

[Jonny88]

I tried the above method but it didn't fix the problem. nano was apparently unavailable so I just used edit instead. The result was similar to the problem I had before, in that the comp would not start an x server. I also tried reinstalling the nvidia drivers via the command line (correctly) from known good drivers. This didn't fix the problem either. Becoming more desperate I attempted 'updating' Suse from the original DVD, while this hasn't fixed my problem it has f***ed the bootloader and allowed me access to a dormant install of windows... SuSE is quickly losing my friendship...
Any further ideas?

[dth1]

When I had similiar problems I used the installation dvd and reinstalled all the xorg rpms. This got me up and running again.

[Jonny88]

how do you do that?

[dth1]

start your system up and when you get to the black screen log-on as root. Then type:-

yast2

and press enter

put your dvd in the drive and follow the screens to install the needed rpms.

[Jonny88]

OK, managed to get the system to load the GUI, but now the Nvidia drivers won't install properly. I've tried doing it properly through the command line but although the drivers say they've installed they aren't appearing in Sax...

[techieMoe]

OK, managed to get the system to load the GUI, but now the Nvidia drivers won't install properly. I've tried doing it properly through the command line but although the drivers say they've installed they aren't appearing in Sax...

If you installed the drivers manually from the command line you shouldn't have to touch SaX2 at all. The drivers should have edited the appropriate line in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and started themselves up.