Do you have Grub bootloader installed? Assuming it is. Maybe menu was set to GRUB_TIMEOUT=0 so you do not see any menu, however it must be there.
Reboot your computer, immediately after POST messages press cursor down (or cursor up) keyboard key and hold it until menu appears. When it appear, navigate to first item and press "e" - it will switch you to menu edit mode. Append " single" to line that contains your kernel filename. Press F10 key. It should boot you into single-user mode, when you'll be asked for password type root password and hit Enter. Now you at runlevel 3 and can install your driver.

If you are just installing the NVIDIA drivers then I believe the commend you are looking for is:There is simply no need to go changing runlevels or messing around with GRUB just to stop X for a little while. When you're finished you can run:Though I would suggest rebooting if installing graphics drivers if for no other reason than to check that they are loaded correctly on boot.

@273 Those are essentially the two commands I use with Ubuntu 14.04 except that I use "lightdm" in place of "mdm".

Indeed. For Gnome-based systems you use "gdm" and for KDE ones "kdm". Unless, of course, you use a different display manager but, in that case, you ought to know what you installed and that will tell you which service to start and stop. I think on systems other than Debian and Red Hat based ones you may need to refer to /etc/init.d/[gdm|kdm|...] or /etc/rc.d/[gdm|kdm|...] instead of using the "service" command.

Though the NVIDIA instructions make the point that if you automatically run X at boot and the graphic drivers don't work, then you might be a little bit stuck.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll try when I get home.

You should not be stuck at all -- you simply press Ctrl+Alt+F2 and go to the terminal and start again. Just because your system is set up to attempt to start a window manager doesn't mean you're stuck with it -- this isn't Windows...

You can run X at boot but you can log into console to stop it.
All you have to do to get into console is <Ctrl+Alt+(Fn1-7)> & stop the DM

Yes I know this thread is old, however this following is some updated information that people may find useful these days. To get to a console, you need to shutdown the display manager.One common display manager is "lightdm" or on Mint it's "mdm". You can use "ps aux | grep dm" to look for a running display maanger process, but you should be careful as that list might have multiple items containing those two characters. It's a process started by root and may also appear on the line for your running X.

To get started, once you know your display manager, open a terminal window and type:

sudo service mdm stop
(change mdm to the running display manager)

When you want to return to the desktop, type this:

sudo service mdm start
(again change to the display maanger you used previously)

If you're looged in as root, you do not need to sudo these commands. Quick, easy and painless and worked for me on Mint 17.1 to install the latest nVidia drivers.


-CA