18.04 - Changing NVIDIA Drivers makes Ubuntu freeze on startup

I recently followed this guide by TensorFlow/Google on how to install all needed drivers/libraries in order to use Tensorflow with my GPU. That is a NVIDIA 1080Ti running on Ubuntu 18.04. In before, I was using the proprietary 430 (I think) driver, that gets automatically managed by Ubuntu.

After executing the following commands:

# Add NVIDIA package repositories
wget     https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.0.130-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.0.130-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys     https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
sudo apt-get update
wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/machine-learning/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/nvidia-machine-learning-repo-ubuntu1804_1.0.0-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./nvidia-machine-learning-repo-ubuntu1804_1.0.0-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get update
# Install NVIDIA driver
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends nvidia-driver-410
# Reboot. Check that GPUs are visible using the command: nvidia-smi

and rebooting, I am faced with the following situation:
Ubuntu always freezes on Startup, with no mouse movement/keyboard presses being accepted. Although my auto-login works (and the time in the top bar gets synchronised correctly), I am not able to do anything thereafter.

What I tried:

• I was able to get into recovery mode with networking. There, I installed the nvidia-driver-430 package and auto-removed all older NVIDIA drivers. However, I am still faced with the exact same problem.


• Adding nomodeset into the kernel options does not resolve the problem either (Ubuntu still freezes on startup).

My question: How can I stop Ubuntu from freezing?

Edit: This is not a duplicate of this question or this question because

• nomodeset didn‘t work


• I thus had to operate in recovery mode


• Ctrl+Alt+F1 didn‘t work

I was able to fix the problem by removing the NVIDIA drivers while in recovery mode.
Run the following commands in recovery mode:

# Enable networking and check for updates
sudo service network-manager start
sudo apt update
# Reinstall Ubuntu-Desktop, install unity
sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
# Remove NVIDIA
sudo apt remove --purge nvidia-driver-
# Reboot
sudo shutdown -r now

Afterwards you can use the standard Terminal and run sudo apt install nvidia-driver- in order to reinstall your NVIDIA driver