Issues installing NVIDIA drivers on CentOS 7

I’m having issues installing the NVIDIA driver on CentOS 7 workstations

Hardware details:
NVIDIA NVS 440 video card - 3 monitors connected to it
Dell 9020 workstation
CentOS 7 - 2 different kernels - 3.10.0-693.21.1 and 3.10.0-862.6

On the 693 kernel the error is “unable to load kernel”; on the 862 kernel the error is “unable to build the NVIDIA kernel module”.

I’ve found, via Google searches, a few different ways of blacklisting the nouveau driver:

Adding “blacklist nouveau” to the following files:
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
/usr/lib/modprobe.d/NVidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf
/etc/modprobe.d/NVidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf

Adding “rdblacklist=nouveau” to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line in /etc/default/grub

Removing the packages xorg-x11-drivers and xorg-x11-drv-nouveau

As mentioned above, on the 693 kernel, the driver installation appears to run through all the steps, but right after the progress message “Installing DKMS kernel module” the error “Unable to load kernel module” comes up.

In /var/log/NVidia-installer.log the main error at the top of the file is “Unable to load: nividia-installer ncurses v6 user interface”

The NVidia driver version is NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-304.137.run

The command “lsmod | grep nouveau” produces no result
The command “lspci -k | grep -A 2 nouveau” shows both the nouveau and NVidia kernel modules

Installing NVIDIA drivers directly using a .run file is almost always a very bad idea.

Please install them via https://rpmfusion.org/

If that doesn’t help, you could try with kernel-alt.