Unable to uninstall/update manually installed Nvidia driver

I am having some trouble uninstalling an older Nvidia driver on Proxmox (v7.1-12). I previously installed driver v470 using a run file from Nvidia’s website and its been working fine. I do however want to update the driver as this one is very old.

I first tried to uninstall the driver using the run file (had to redownload that specific version as I deleted the old one) using ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.103.01.run -uninstall but the installer shows the following :

There is no NVIDIA driver currently installed.

I then downloaded the latest driver (v535) which shows

The NVIDIA driver appears to have been installed previously using a different installer. To prevent potential conflicts, it is recommended either to update the existing installation
using the same mechanism by which it was originally installed, or to uninstall the existing installation before installing this driver.

Please review the message provided by the maintainer of this alternate installation method and decide how to proceed:

and if I select continue installation it shows

if you want to use the nvidia-installer please uninstall the Debian packages first. The two methods of installation cannot be used at the same time.

Running nvidia-smi shows the following

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

| NVIDIA-SMI 470.103.01   Driver Version: 470.103.01   CUDA Version: 11.4     |

|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |

| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |

|                               |                      |               MIG M. |

|===============================+======================+======================|

|   0  Quadro P400         Off  | 00000000:0F:00.0 Off |                  N/A |

| 30%   42C    P0    N/A /  N/A |      0MiB /  1998MiB |      0%      Default |

|                               |                      |                  N/A |

+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

                                                                            

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

| Processes:                                                                  |

|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |

|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |

|=============================================================================|

|  No running processes found                                                 |

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

I’m not sure what else I can try to update the driver.

I should add that as far as I can remember I haven’t installed any debian packages for Nvidia.

Please post the output of
dpkg -l |grep nvidia
to check for a packaged install.

1 Like

The following is output. Are all these 470* entries from the manual installation or are these also installed from dpkg?

ri  glx-alternative-nvidia               1.2.1~deb11u1                  amd64        allows the selection of NVIDIA as GLX provider
ii  libegl-nvidia0:amd64                 470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary EGL library
ii  libgl1-nvidia-glvnd-glx:amd64        470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary OpenGL/GLX library (GLVND variant)
ii  libgles-nvidia1:amd64                470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary OpenGL|ES 1.x library
ii  libgles-nvidia2:amd64                470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary OpenGL|ES 2.x library
ii  libglx-nvidia0:amd64                 470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary GLX library
ii  libnvidia-cbl:amd64                  470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary Vulkan ray tracing (cbl) library
ii  libnvidia-cfg1:amd64                 470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary OpenGL/GLX configuration library
ii  libnvidia-egl-wayland1:amd64         1:1.1.5-1                      amd64        Wayland EGL External Platform library -- shared library
ii  libnvidia-eglcore:amd64              470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary EGL core libraries
ii  libnvidia-encode1:amd64              470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVENC Video Encoding runtime library
ii  libnvidia-glcore:amd64               470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary OpenGL/GLX core libraries
ii  libnvidia-glvkspirv:amd64            470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary Vulkan Spir-V compiler library
ii  libnvidia-ml1:amd64                  470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA Management Library (NVML) runtime library
ii  libnvidia-ptxjitcompiler1:amd64      470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA PTX JIT Compiler library
ii  libnvidia-rtcore:amd64               470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary Vulkan ray tracing (rtcore) library
ii  nvidia-alternative                   470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        allows the selection of NVIDIA as GLX provider
ii  nvidia-driver                        470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA metapackage
ii  nvidia-driver-bin                    470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA driver support binaries
ii  nvidia-driver-libs:amd64             470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA metapackage (OpenGL/GLX/EGL/GLES libraries)
ii  nvidia-egl-common                    470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary EGL driver - common files
ii  nvidia-egl-icd:amd64                 470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA EGL installable client driver (ICD)
ii  nvidia-installer-cleanup             20151021+13                    amd64        cleanup after driver installation with the nvidia-installer
ii  nvidia-kernel-common                 20151021+13                    amd64        NVIDIA binary kernel module support files
ii  nvidia-kernel-dkms                   470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary kernel module DKMS source
ii  nvidia-kernel-support                470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary kernel module support files
ii  nvidia-legacy-check                  470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        check for NVIDIA GPUs requiring a legacy driver
ii  nvidia-modprobe                      470.94-1~bpo11+1               amd64        utility to load NVIDIA kernel modules and create device nodes
ii  nvidia-persistenced                  460.32.03-1                    amd64        daemon to maintain persistent software state in the NVIDIA driver
ii  nvidia-settings                      470.94-1~bpo11+1               amd64        tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
ii  nvidia-smi                           470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA System Management Interface
ii  nvidia-support                       20151021+13                    amd64        NVIDIA binary graphics driver support files
ii  nvidia-vdpau-driver:amd64            470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix - NVIDIA driver
ii  nvidia-vulkan-common                 470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA Vulkan driver - common files
ii  nvidia-vulkan-icd:amd64              470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA Vulkan installable client driver (ICD)
ii  xserver-xorg-video-nvidia            470.103.01-1~bpo11+1           amd64        NVIDIA binary Xorg driver

Your memory fooled you, you installed the driver from debian repo, not using the runfile.
The debian 11 repo only provides drivers up to 470, so if you want to upgrade, you’ll either have to use an additional repo (e.g. the nvidia cuda repo) or the runfile installer with --dkms option. In any case, you’ll have to uninstall/purge the installed driver first using apt.

Thanks for the help. Purging all the installed drivers / tools via apt solved the issue

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