I upgraded my graphics card in my 2008 MacPro to an Nvidia 950. This of course requires the Nvidia WebDriver since Apple doesn’t offer built-in support. I installed the driver, swapped my cards, and it worked like a charm.
Today I had a security update from Apple and thought nothing of it. Unfortunately, after the chime, the video never showed up! I didn’t panic immediately. I SSHed into my computer, and told it to reboot just to see if it was a glitch. No luck… I also tried using screen sharing, alas screen sharing doesn’t work without a GPU.
Luckily it is possible to fix this problem with nothing more than an SSH connection to the troubled Mac. I logged in, and ran the command, system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType, to determine which OS Release I have so I can choose the appropriate WebDriver package.
$ system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType
Software:
System Software Overview:
System Version: OS X 10.11.6 (15G20015)
Kernel Version: Darwin 15.6.0
Boot Volume: Macintosh SSD
Boot Mode: Normal
Computer Name: MikePro
User Name: Michael Caldwell (michaelcaldwell)
Secure Virtual Memory: Enabled
System Integrity Protection: Enabled
Time since boot: 3 minutes
The helpful people at MacVidCards.com keep a handy list of all the up-to-date releases of the WebDriver. I selected the appropriate one and was able to install it over SSH using the installer command (which I didn’t know existed before today!).
$ sudo installer -pkg WebDriver-346.03.15f13.pkg -target /
Password:
installer: Package name is NVIDIA Web Driver 346.03.15f13
installer: Upgrading at base path /
installer: The upgrade was successful.
installer: The install requires restarting now.
$ sudo reboot
Connection to 10.0.1.12 closed by remote host.After the reboot, the display popped on just like it used to. Crisis averted!