Nvidia drivers boot to black screen, purging doesn't help

Question

Absolutely no idea what I'm doing wrong. This is a fresh install of Elementary OS.

1. I installed the OS
2. Made sure to install drivers during the OS installation
3. Once the os was loaded I checked out the "Nvidia X Server Settings", unfortunately it was completely blank.
4. Purged Nvidia
5. Reinstalled (followed this guide, but installed nvidia-driver-440 instead)
6. On reboot the Nvidia X Server Settings show that I'm using discrete graphics, however there are no other options aside from switching back to integrated
7. If I switch to integrated, reboot, then switch to discrete once more my system doesn't boot and shows me a black screen after the Elementary OS logo. This can only be fixed by running sudo prime-select intel in the recovery shell.

What's happening? Is there any way to fix it? I know nvidia-driver-440 works as I was using it on Pop_os just the other day on the same laptop.

Running nvidia-smi outputs this:

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.

My discrete card is a NVIDIA Corporation GP108M [GeForce MX150] (rev a1), and it does appear under Settings > About.

Any suggestions would be very appreciated.

Answer 1

The issue seems to have been related to secure boot.

I hadn't set an admin password in my BIOS, which I suppose was required? So while I had disabled secure boot at some point in the past, this specific setting had been reset or was being ignored by the lack of an admin pass.

Setting the password solved the issue.