I updated Ubuntu and my Nvidia drivers were uninstalled

[facubuntu2025]

Ubuntu Version: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS

Problem Description & What I’ve Tried:

After running the commands sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade as a routine check, the system told me that there were about 30 packages to update and began a 900 MB download.
Before it finished, a purple window popped up (I’m sharing a photo of it, since I unfortunately didn’t take a screenshot) telling me something about setting a password when restarting, so I entered the password 123456789 just in case.

After the terminal showed me that the process was complete, I restarted the system.

When I did this, a window popped up giving me four options, which I don’t remember exactly right now, but among them were to continue with the restart and others related to MOK. I chose to continue with the restart and Ubuntu restarted, but the resolution it did so at was not that of my monitor. After that, I restarted the system again, and this time it did so at the correct resolution, but I felt that the whole system was running very slowly. The mouse would freeze from time to time and all the windows took too long to load, so I ran the following commands nvidia-smi and cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version and this is what I got:

facundo@Facundo-Ubuntu:~$ nvidia-smi 
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

facundo@Facundo-Ubuntu:~$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
cat: /proc/driver/nvidia/version: No such file or directory

Then I went to the NVIDIA X Server Settings app, and as you can see in the screenshot, it wasn’t recognizing my graphics card.

At this point, I tried the following

Commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt autoremove

and then Settings -> System -> Software Updates

Here it downloaded, installed, and deleted certain packages. I then restarted to see if things had been resolved and found that they had not.

I honestly don’t know what to do. I’m not good with computers, and I’m new to using Linux. I’m sorry if this sounds like a stupid problem, but I’d appreciate it if someone could guide me on how to solve it.

Thank you very much.

[nio-wiklund]

• Please tell us the model name and number of your nvidia card.
• It might also help us help you if you tell us the brand name and model of the
  • computer
  • CPU
  • monitor (if external)

[aaronprisk]

Hello @facubuntu2025!
If you’re able to bring up the GNOME menu, do a search for “Drivers” and look for the Additional Drivers utility.

From there, you should see the available NVIDIA drivers for your card. Select one of the recent NVIDIA ones and hit Apply Changes.

You can also do this via the terminal by running:
sudo ubuntu-drivers list

Which will present you with the list of compatible drivers.
Next you can run:

sudo ubuntu-drivers install

Which will auto select and install the best driver. Alternatively, you can also specify the specify driver you’d like by appending nvidia:### at the end of that command.

[dinomonster]

If i understand this correctly, what you did was that you did not enter the password which is required to correct install procedure of the drivers.

To enter password, what you needed to do was to select “Enroll key from disk” and then enter it.

My only advice that I can think now, would be to try uninstalling driver and then doing it’s reinstall.

[florin-andrei]

Looks like the most recent version of the NVIDIA drivers is broken. My system worked great until yesterday, when I did apt-get full-upgrade, it installed the latest drivers, and GPU support completely broke.

I found a workaround, see here:

Modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'nvidia': Key was rejected by service

Ubuntu Version: Ubuntu Desktop 24.04.3 LTS Desktop Environment (if applicable): Default env Problem Description: This is my development box. I’ve been using it for a long time. I run various GPU tasks on it, such as PyTorch code, LLMs, etc. Yesterday, I did apt-get update; apt-get full-upgrade as I always do at the end of the day. I noticed it did some NVIDIA updates. Then I rebooted into Windows. Later, I booted Linux again. Then I noticed all GPU support was gone. Anything requiring GPU …

[facubuntu2025]

I forgot to reply, but I found a solution (link):

I ran the command
sudo update-secureboot-policy --enroll-key
and this reopened that purple window from the beginning, and I was able to complete the whole process correctly.

I restarted the system and after running the nvidia-smi command, my video card appeared.

Thank you very much to everyone who replied!

[facubuntu2025]

Yes, I should have chosen that option, but I missed by accident. Then, when I restarted the system, it no longer appeared, but with the command

sudo update-secureboot-policy --enroll-key

I managed to complete the process and choose the option correctly