Beware of NVIDIA web driver 313.01.01! Took my machine down for a day!

NVIDIAWeb

Yesterday I saw that NVIDIA had released a new web driver , 313.01.01, and was hoping it would help my Geforce GTX 670, but instead it caused a cascade of failures and kept me down for a whole day!

Installation went fine. bit on restart the computer would not come up. Eventually I had to put my old Geforce GTX 275 back into my Mac so I could use option and boot into my edrive or the emergency partition (both of which I had to use). First off even with the GTX 275 the computer would not boot at all, not in single user mode or even safe mode (well I honestly stopped Safe Mode after about 2 hours, it was still moving, but going so slow I didn’t think it would boot.

And even emergency mode was trouble, because my external OWC 3TB backup drive, no longer mounted, so I couldn’t do a restore from my Time Machine partition! And I didn’t want to try and re-install the system over the old system, just in case, so I had to go to Best buy and get a new Hard Drive.

DId you know that the new Seagate Barracuda drives in fact don’t say Barracuda anywhere on the box? It just stays Desktop, though the drive still says Barracuda! WTF?!?!?!??!

So I got that drive home and re-installed a fresh install of OS X on it, and then had it take my old user and settings from the old drive, which after about 5 hours worked just fine (though I had to move the drive internally as it wasn’t working from my external USB housing for some reason).

After everything was in place (including my slow finder) i reinstalled my GTX 670 and the machine rebooted just fine, and even stranger now has the NVIDIA control panel installed, but not the new driver.

I could immediately see the menu bar item for the new control panel.

NVIDIAMenu

And when I opened the control panel it informed me that yes that driver is incompatible with my system! YES NO KIDDING! So what systems is it for?
NVIDIACOntrolPanel

I just wished it realized the Web Driver was not compatible before it installed it before, as it took down my whole system! And I had to buy a new hard drive to get it up and running again!

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