CUDA Disabled After Latest Driver Installation

[Jon Howard]

Quick update. On the Nvidia website I found the following info, which I followed:

To uninstall this driver and restore your original Mac OS X v10.8.2 driver, follow the steps below:

STEP 1: During the installation process, a backup archive of your current drivers will be created. If for any reason you need to uninstall the 304.00.05f02 driver, the “NVIDIA Driver Restore.mpkg” is located in /Library/Application Support/NVIDIA.

IMPORTANT: Do not move this package from its default location. Doing so will invalidate the uninstall/restore process. Also, this process is only valid with Mac OS X v10.8.2. Installing any newer version of the OS over this driver will also invalidate the uninstall/restore process.
STEP 2: After locating the NVIDIA Driver Restore.mpkg archive, double-click on the package. You will be guided through the driver restoration process. Click Continue after you read the Welcome screen.

STEP 3: Click Install on the Standard Installer screen. You will be required to enter an Administrator password to continue.

STEP 4: Click Continue Installation on the Warning screen: The Warning screen lets you know that you will need to restart your system once the installation process is complete.

STEP 5: Click Restart on the Installation Completed Successfully screen.

ALTERNATE METHOD – If for any reason you are unable to boot your system to the desktop and wish to restore your original Mac OS X v10.8.2 driver, you can also do so from “Single-User” mode:

STEP 1: Restart your Macintosh computer and hold down the “Command” (apple) key and the “s” key to boot into “Single User” mode.

STEP 2: When the system finishes loading to a command prompt, type the command “NVIDIARecovery” (no quotation marks), and hit the “Return” key.

STEP 3: The 304.00.05f02 driver will be uninstalled and your original Mac OS X v10.8.2 driver will be restored. The computer will then reboot automatically.

The NVidia Driver Restore application failed to install, just like the drivers (installation failed screen), so I tried the single user mode. I no longer have CUDA drivers on my machine, which is good, but I’m now unable to install them. Still get installation failure.

I’m in the middle of a project that got moved to this machine and, as soon as I’m done, I’m going to reinstall OS 10.7 and see if that solves the issue. I had similar “Installation Failed” issues with my Wacom Intuos driver and, from what I could find, that was Mountain Lion related.

If anyone else is having any similar issues, please let me know. It would be great to knock heads on this and figure out what’s happening.

Thanks in advance!

Jon

“If you can describe what it is, that’s not it.”

[Jon Howard]

Hopefully this is helpful to someone because it took me a pretty ridiculously long time to figure it out. From digging around several dozen forums, it seems there are two things at play here:

1) The Nvidia Quadro 4000 mac drivers are already in OS X Mountain Lion and don’t need to be installed from the Nvidia website.

2) The CUDA drivers are a separate install.

Since my Quadro 4000 seems to be working fine, with the exception of CUDA, I downloaded the latest driver from this page:

https://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html

Interestingly, this is the driver I originally downloaded and it worked fine. I didn’t run into issues until I installed a new driver from the System Preferences CUDA pane. I restarted and now Premiere CS6 is seeing CUDA and all is well.

So, the lesson I’ve gleaned from this experience and reading other posts is DO NOT install the latest CUDA drivers from NVidia. If what you have works, don’t fix it. The 5.0.37 drivers are a case in point. Fortunately, you can either run the driver restore app or the Single User mode command listed in my second post (pasted from the Nvidia website) and reinstall older CUDA drivers from the link above.

Really hope this saves somebody a headache.

Jon

“If you can describe what it is, that’s not it.”

[Cliff Stephenson]

Thanks Jon,
I did a bunch of system updates last night and when I opened Premiere, it told me I no longer had CUDA GPU ability. Thanks for doing the leg-work because this is going to be a problem for a lot of people I suspect.

[Chris Borjis]

Always appreciate when someone posts a problem and the fix they
found.

thanks!