Booting with NVIDIA drivers results in a black screen.

Installing Zorin OS
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"I'm encountering a black screen when booting with NVIDIA drivers on a system equipped with a 1070 Ti GPU and an older ASUS Gene Z Gen3 motherboard. The issue occurs both when selecting NVIDIA drivers during boot and after installing them post-setup followed by a reboot. The motherboard lacks Secure Boot but operates in UEFI mode.

On another machine, using the same USB stick and with Secure Boot and TPM enabled, everything works flawlessly — which suggests the problem isn't with the installer itself.

I’ve tried editing GRUB boot parameters, but it didn’t resolve the issue. The system runs perfectly fine without NVIDIA drivers. I’ve experienced the same black screen on KDE and GNOME versions of another distro when installing NVIDIA via RPM Fusion.

According to NVIDIA’s documentation, version 570 is compatible with the 1070 Ti, and I believe that’s the version included in the live USB. However, it still results in a failure during runtime.

One possible explanation could be a kernel-NVIDIA driver mismatch, but if that were the case, wouldn't the same issue occur on the other (working) PC?

Would you recommend focusing on trying different NVIDIA driver versions, or should I look deeper into post-installation configurations?"

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Hi, welcome to Zorin OS!

Is that other computer running the same version of Zorin OS? What is the make and model?

You should try using a different driver. I don't know much about this topic in general but Nvidia is a known troublemaker.

There are other threads that you can search through for some ideas that may work out in your case:

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Yes, I tested the same USB drive on two different PCs. Zorin OS 17.3 Core (r1). On the second PC, it boots and works fine with an RTX 3080 + Z490 setup.

In my research, some people mentioned a kernel-driver incompatibility. The fact that the NVIDIA website lists version 570 as the appropriate driver for the 1070 Ti — and that some older posts mention getting it to work with earlier versions — has confused me.

If the problem is the driver, I’m not sure which version works best for the 1070 Ti. I believe Zorin 17.3 uses the 6.8 kernel.

If the issue is the kernel, is it possible to downgrade to an earlier version? Or could I edit the live CD to boot with a different driver version, like 535 instead of 570?

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I had a Nvidia 1070 before I switched to AMD and my experience is that driver 545 is the last that worked properly with that card. After 545 it was a headache after another.

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First of all, thank you for your responses. Considering that you mentioned using the 545 driver version and assuming this was in 2023, I’m guessing the kernel version at that time was from the 5.x series?

Is there any way to integrate the 545 driver into the live CD, or alternatively, downgrade the kernel version? Constantly performing fresh installs has started to wear out my hard drive."

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Welcome to the Forum!

You could install the 545 or maybe 535 Nvidia Driver without downgrading the Kernel. It runs with the 6.8 Kernel.

First uninstall the current Driver:

sudo apt purge nvidia*

Then install the Driver You want use with:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-[Version-Number] nvidia-dkms-[Version-Number]

Replace [Version-Number] with the Driver Version, You want use. Here an Example for the 535 Driver:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 nvidia-dkms-535

Repeat these Steps to try different Driver Versions. And there is another Point: Because You are using a Nvidia Graphics, it would be good to run Your System in X11/Xorg if not already doing. You can check that it Settings>About.

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