Reinstall nvidia drivers

I currently have a non booting system. I have been getting an error regarding nvidia-340 since Ubuntu 16 upgrade. On upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 the update had an error and said something about unusable state. The Ubuntu 17.10 did boot and boy does it look good. There was graphics issues so I figured by uninstalling I can reinstall nvidia.

Long story short I lost access to boot and am now booting from recovery.

I had an issue with access to the Internet but that's solved with lots of Google searches.

I have tried to purge nvidia-*, apt remove, tried using dkpg

Every time I get "errors were encountered while processing nvidia-331-uvm" or dependencies issue tried --fix-broken install

Tried force removing nvidia-331-uvm and nvidia-340

I'm all out of options and Google searches.

The computer starts to boot but gets stuck at "stopping user manager for uid"

I've tried lots of suggestions from Google, workarounds "fixes" and I'm still stuck

The graphics card is an old 8800gts

Thanks in advance any help is appreciated. My biggest issue with Linux is the fact things just don't work always have to spend hours trying to fix something.

Edit..

This is the error I've been getting since Ubuntu 14.04 I think.

    sudo dpkg --force-all -i nvidia-331-uvm_340.104-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb
Selecting previously unselected package nvidia-331-uvm.
(Reading database ... 389526 files and directories currently installed.)Preparing to unpack nvidia-331-uvm_340.104-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb ...
Failed to stop var-lib-snapd-lib-gl.mount: Unit var-lib-snapd-lib-gl.mount not loaded.
dpkg: warning: subprocess old pre-removal script returned error exit status 5
dpkg: trying script from the new package instead ...
dpkg: error processing archive nvidia-331-uvm_340.104-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb (--install):
 there is no script in the new version of the package - giving up
Errors were encountered while processing:
 nvidia-331-uvm_340.104-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb

As you can see it's moaning about a pre-removal script

Solution 1:

If the previous recommendations have not worked, you might want to try the following:

1. Reinstall the operating system.

2. After installation, open a terminal and type:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade
   

3. In a terminal type:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
   

4. In a terminal type:

   sudo apt-get update
   

5. In a terminal type command:

   sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-340 nvidia-settings
   

(340 being the Nvidia driver version you need to install and currently the only drivers version that supports legacy hardware such as yours) 6. Reboot your machine. 7. Check if the Nvidia driver is installed. Open a terminal and type:

    lsmod | grep nvidia

You should see something like this:

nvidia_uvm            671744  0
nvidia_drm             49152  2
nvidia_modeset        843776  3 nvidia_drm
nvidia              13123584  85 nvidia_modeset,nvidia_uvm
drm_kms_helper        155648  2 i915_bpo,nvidia_drm
drm                   364544  6 i915_bpo,drm_kms_helper,nvidia_drm