Nvidia drivers stooped working on update 20.04.3

Sadly I was not able to resolve this one. I wish I could delete this question without being penalized. This was my main workstation and I was using it for work. I could not wait any longer. I had to reinstall the system.

Everything when fine for more than 2 years. After the last Ubuntu update, my system stopped recognizing the monitor and no matter what drivers I'm using I'm stuck with

• unknown monitor
• 1024x768 resolution

My system configuration

bogdan@bogdan-pc ~ $ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
Release:    20.04
Codename:   focal
bogdan@bogdan-pc ~ $ uname -r
5.13.0-22-generic
bogdan@bogdan-pc ~ $ lspci | grep VGA
08:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] (rev a1)
bogdan@bogdan-pc ~ $ 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.

I have tried switching between different versions of drivers and also the nouveau drivers. I have also noticed that when installing a particular driver the package manager picks the 20.04.1 version and my system is 20.04.3.

Last time I tried installing Install command

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470

Snippet from install logs

Setting up libnvidia-gl-470:amd64 (470.86-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...
Setting up libnvidia-gl-470:i386 (470.86-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...
Setting up libnvidia-decode-470:amd64 (470.86-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...
Setting up libnvidia-decode-470:i386 (470.86-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...
Setting up xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-470 (470.86-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...
Setting up libnvidia-ifr1-470:amd64 (470.86-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...
Setting up libnvidia-ifr1-470:i386 (470.86-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...

I have also tried

sudo apt update
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Please help me out

i have the same issue it looks like i resolved it by

sudo apt remove nvidia-driver-470 --purge
sudo apt autoremove 
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
sudo init 6

I was stuck with suspend crashing, and discovered hints toward updating graphics drivers. Couldn't change or update them, and I noted also that system updates were lagging.

If this (from the post above) doesn't work

sudo apt remove nvidia-driver-470 --purge
sudo apt autoremove 
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

...and you get errors that software cannot be downloaded or certificates are outdated... so there may be a problem with software sources.

I found out that the servers had changed for Ubuntu 20.04.03 in some point in the end of 2021, and after some digging I found out that my /etc/apt/sources.list was outdated.

Maybe because of upgrade, not clean install (could have been my own tampering too), the national versions of the servers were referenced (fr.archive.ubuntu.com) instead of plain archive.ubuntu.com).

You can find the correct sources.list here: https://gist.github.com/ishad0w/788555191c7037e249a439542c53e170

I also updated the CA sertificates after correcting sources.list:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates
sudo apt-get upgrade