Fix NVIDIA Driver After Ubuntu Unattended Upgrade

Introduction

Today, when I started to use my Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, I got notified that I had to restart my computer to apply the latest updates. I realized that an unattended upgrade had been installed on my operating system. After the restart, I found that my NVIDIA driver was not working properly.

$ 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.

Even after I restarted my computer several times, the NVIDIA driver was still not working.

In this blog post, I would like to share how I fixed the NVIDIA driver issue after an Ubuntu unattended upgrade.

Fix NVIDIA Driver After Ubuntu Unattended Upgrade

Theoretically, I could have purged the NVIDIA driver and reinstalled it. However, I thought it was safer to use the “Ubuntu Additional Drivers” tool to reinstall the NVIDIA driver.

In my case, I was using nvidia-driver-550 (proprietary, tested) and it was no longer working. I switched to nvidia-driver-550-open (proprietary) and restarted my computer. The NVIDIA driver was working properly again.

Later, I had also tried switching back to nvidia-driver-550 (proprietary, tested) and it still worked.

Turn Off Ubuntu Unattended Upgrade

I also turned off the Ubuntu unattended upgrade to prevent this issue from happening again. The unattended upgrade can be turned off by setting the “Automatically check for updates” to “Never” in the “Software & Updates” tool under the “Updates” tab.