A funny thing happened

Just when you think you understand computers and certain sets of commands, weird almost  nonsensical things can happen.  So to tell the full story on Wednesday my AC broke down, so trying to keep things as cool as possible in my place, I turned off all my computers when they were not in use, that included my desk top.  I turned it back on on Friday, then checked on it a hour or so later.

Well my GPU was not crunching, it was saying GPU missing, so I went through the list of updates and installed them, and restarted, still no go.  It showed no new driver up dates, nor a new version of the driver for my GPU, so I figured a complete reinstall of the drivers and the CUDA toolkit and SDK and all that fun stuff.

So I found a walk through that seemed to only get me half way and left me thinking my computer was in far worse shape than I started.  A few steps into the walk through it told me to purge all the nVidia files, which I did, restarted, and my Computer started emitting sporadic high pitched beeps when running.  Sadly the rest of the walk through failed for me, I could not get it to work what so ever.  From the log in screen it wanted me to hit ctrl-alt-F1 to get to a terminal type screen, the problem though is I couldn't go further, after logging in, it failed to accept any sort of Bash Command. well actually it failed to recognize any sort of command.

That is the point I called it quits last night.  Talked with a few people, and decided a fresh install might be the way to go.  This morning I wanted to give things one more try, so not using the guide any more, I simply logged in and went to the Additional Drivers and installed the drivers, and the updates.  Getting ready to try and find the guide to compiling the SDK and using the CUDA Toolkit, that I had previously used that worked out.  I decided to check boinc, and low and behold, some how my GPU was crunching away.

So it appears the purge command does not do what I thought it does and it somehow left the SDK and Toolkit installation perfectly in place, and it must have just been a bad path name that was fixed upon re-installation of the drivers.