After a seemingly innocent kernel update to 3.5.0-27 my nvidia drivers went crazy and stopped working. Should have been simple enough to fix, but somehow after a reinstall and reboot I was stuck at a black screen with a blinking cursor and my keyboard not working so I was unable to enter a tty. In case you find yourself in a problem like this, try the following which worked for me.
Reboot your machine and when grub pops up (hold shift) to boot into recovery mode. Select to open a root terminal when the recovery mode loads and do the following
Remove lightdm window manager and the current nvidia drivers
apt-get remove --purge lightdm nvidia-currentKeep in mind, that if you installed the nvidia drivers directly from their website, you need to download the same run file again and run it with —uninstall
./NVIDIA_DRIVERS_YOU_INSTALLED --uninstallAfter that, simply install lightdm and nvidia-current again
apt-get install lightdm nvidia-currentAnd then run
service lightdm startThis method worked for me, but countless others didn’t, so hopefully it works for you.