Nvidia driver not loaded properly

I rebooted Ubuntu 18.04 today after a week of inactivity only to find that running

nvidia-smi

in the terminal resulted in the following response:

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

I tried troubleshooting this at first by checking other questions on this issue.

I tried purging and then reinstalling my Nvidia graphics driver (sudo apt install nvidia-driver-440), toggling prime-select between intel and nvidia before rebooting, checking for blacklists in /etc/modprobe.d/, and disabling Secure Boot, but to no avail. NVIDIA-SMI still says it failed.

I am not sure what to do now, so I was wondering if anyone here could help me troubleshoot.

Running

sudo dpkg --get-selections | grep nvidia | cut -f1

results in the following:

libnvidia-cfg1-440:amd64
libnvidia-common-440
libnvidia-compute-440:amd64
libnvidia-compute-440:i386
libnvidia-decode-440:amd64
libnvidia-decode-440:i386
libnvidia-encode-440:amd64
libnvidia-encode-440:i386
libnvidia-extra-440:amd64
libnvidia-fbc1-440:amd64
libnvidia-fbc1-440:i386
libnvidia-gl-440:amd64
libnvidia-gl-440:i386
libnvidia-ifr1-440:amd64
libnvidia-ifr1-440:i386
nvidia-compute-utils-440
nvidia-dkms-440
nvidia-driver-440
nvidia-kernel-common-440
nvidia-kernel-source-440
nvidia-prime
nvidia-settings
nvidia-utils-440
xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-440

Running

sudo lshw -c display

results in the following:

*-display UNCLAIMED       
   description: VGA compatible controller
   product: NVIDIA Corporation
   vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
   version: a1
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:a3000000-a3ffffff memory:90000000-9fffffff memory:a0000000-a1ffffff ioport:5000(size=128) memory:c0000-dffff

Running

nvidia-settings

returns:

ERROR: NVIDIA driver is not loaded

ERROR: Unable to load info from any available system

Obviously, I have not installed the driver properly, and though I have tried the common troubleshooting methods multiple times, they simply do not work.
This issue is rather troublesome since currently on nouveau driver, the screen resolution only goes up to 1920x1080, and changing the screen resolution via the gnome system settings sometime during the troubleshooting process resulted in a blank screen upon boot.
I had to modify my /etc/default/grub, so my system is a bit wonky right now, but it works nonetheless.
Hopefully getting my Nvidia driver would work would solve these issues and also allow my computer to sleep without blanking out, forcing a complete shutdown.

Thanks!