can't boot after cuda toolkit installation

[Liran]

Running Lenovo LEGION laptop with dual boot - win10 and centos 8. after installing cuda toolkit on centos, it can't boot.

I guess it might be related to new nvidia drivers that doesn't fit my gpu (nvidia geforce rtx 2060).

when booting from centos, it get stuck on

Starting Switch Root...
[ 6.514970] iTCO_wdt: can't request region for resources [mem 0x00c5fffc-0x00c5ffff]

as suggested by other posts I have deleted from grub the

rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau

and tried instead nouveau.modeset=0 and nouveau.modeset=1 - both didn't do the trick.

I get instead to pixels on my screen that are not identifiable fonts.

Any idea on how to get to a cli where I can start doing something? ...at least to be able to update drivers.
should I remove something else on grub edit?

grub.jpg (48.52 KiB) Viewed 1246 times

[TrevorH]

Remove 'quiet' so you can see any errors.

[Liran]

I have removed quiet and this is what I get

[TrevorH]

I'd suggest starting with the current version of CentOS 8 not 8.0 which is 2 years old.

[Liran]

@TrevorH, meaning boot from usb?

[TrevorH]

Meaning your installed kernel is, according to your grub menu screenshot, 4.18.0-147.8.1.el8_1.x86_64 which is a kernel from CentOS 8.1 dating from 2019-11-05. That means your entire system is going on 2 years out of date and you're trying to run an nvidia driver that will only have been tested using the latest version, currently 4.18.0-305.7.1.el8_4.x86_64.

Run yum update to get up to date then start over. We recommend using the ELRepo packaged kmod-nvidia drivers as they do everything for you including all blacklisting etc.

[Liran]

How can I run yum update when I cant reach the cli?

[TrevorH]

Hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 or F3 etc to switch to a cli terminal and login there.

[Liran]

that's the problem...
it doesn't work.
while booting I see clear fonts, but then, at some point, it gets too small or something happens to the fonts which make the text unreadable.
that's why I think it's related to the graphic driver.
I have tried using "set gfx_payload=text" and also added text and single to the linux command in the boot menu -> it is still unreadable.

[Liran]

Here's an example