I’d like to delete this thread eventually, but I appreciate all the responses immensely and feel those involved are owed some sort of update for their investment, so I will leave it for the time being.

Some context, and if you already think I’m too melodramatic or whatever, these next two paragraphs are the ones you should skip. First in regards to my meltdown, which I apologize for: it was largely less about this specific situation and more a straw that broke the camel’s back situation; I live with a mental health condition and am in a less than healthy overall space currently. This condition never excuses any of my bad behavior nor absolves me of any of my responsibility, but hopefully may serve to at least explain some of it.

In regards to my knowledge: I once considered myself somewhat savvy, but did not work to keep up with advancements nor ever really stepped from the periphery of the field into the actual deep end. As a teenager, I worked at a computer cable company and worked a MarketPro Computer Shows booth on weekends. I did actually build my PC at that time from components with minimal, but not zero, help. I’ve installed and reinstalled Windows countless times on multiple PCs from the 90s through the 2020s, not without many problems along the way at times, but most often successfully. I used to use DOS on my oldest system, I paid for a domain and host for a crude website I wrote in basic HTML, and I knew enough Java (or Javascript? I don’t even remember) from computer class in high school to write you a very, very basic game of blackjack, but that’s about it. In terms of hardware, I’ve plugged things into slots on the motherboard, but never played with what looks like the architecture and chips on the board itself to me. When this current PC first arrived (“built” online custom through selection from CyberpowerPC), I panicked at first thinking I’d gotten ripped off because I’d paid for 2 SSDs and 1 HDD but there was only one storage drive plugged in! The very idea they could be “part of the chips” was unthinkable. And finally, importantly, I had booted Pop! from the USB multiple times without installing to play around briefly and see if I could at least feel comfortable with basic navigation and how to access the terminal, especially in the case of some unexpected failure in the GUI element of Pop, which, as I understand, can happen, and which I thought accounted for the resolution problem and could be solved once install happened.

Now I want to acknowledge my mistakes, though I don’t presume this to be comprehensive:

• Taking lightly a task that deserved more intention.
• Not preparing for the at-hand moment with a clear guide instead of assuming it would just be fine because I’d installed Windows before.
• Not securing some means of support or other emergency plan prior to execution.
• Playing with hardware I did not fully understand (the SSDs).
• Not ensuring I had the most up-to-date, properly sourced distro install.
• Letting my fear of difficulty learning an unfamiliar step along the way (renaming the two identical SSD drives so they appear clearly distinct in BIOS) assume I could just skip it and would be able to figure it out.
• Breaking up my preparation into too widely spaced times: I don’t even remember when I first read about Pop, but I remember liking what I’d heard about how Windows-familiar it was for learners and downloaded the install then. Then at least months later, I read up on the install process, from a couple tech/Linux sites and Reddit posts, and finally, another couple months later brings up to this post.
• Panicking.
• Taking actions while panicking.

The update: Windows seemed very broken. My girlfriend tried to make a Windows install USB from her Mac but was unable to make it work. Eventually, we went to a friend’s house and used their PC. By this point, I was panicking and still facing the problem of identical SSDs, so after repair still wasn’t working, I ended up using the install utility to wipe one of the SSDs completely and reinstall Windows. I believe I selected the correct drive, and of course everything on that drive was lost, but that drive mostly was my Windows install drive due to a past of having to format and reinstall Windows on machines in the past, so comparatively minimal data loss. As of right now, my second SSD is not visible in Windows, but that has been emptied in advance of the Linux install, so losing the capacity sucks, but in terms of data loss, it’s negligible. Frankly, I have not yet been in a stable enough mental state to test if I can still boot Pop from the other drive or not.

For now, I’m going to get my Windows back in the state I want and sit on that for a while. Eventually, I will take a second swing at it, at the very least with current, of-the-minute, from the developer’s site or distributor version of Pop, if not a different distro entirely if that might allow me to use my GPU and not switch my monitor to the motherboard (which is a tremendous solution I had not thought of, thank you to those who suggested it). I still don’t understand if the Pascal thing is unique to Pop or is going to be an ongoing challenge with Linux or how to get the Nouveau driver if that might solve the issue.

To everyone who commented, thank you so much for your support. As somebody who has been chronically online since the 90s and at the border of normie and techie spaces to some degree, I don’t think it’s much overstated to say that the Linux community as a whole has long been the sort of “punk rock rockstars” of the PC space in my eyes. I am beyond sick of corporate overreach, nannying, and exploitation; I long for the knowledge to afford myself the agency over my own machine and a deeper understanding of what’s actually happening under the hood, which is why I want to learn and make the switch. And just like my experience with the punk music community, a lot of you welcomed me in and shared incredibly kind words and, more so, related to me with stories that made me feel not alone or inherently incapable. I know we’re all a bunch of strangers sitting in our relative corners of the world, but that really meant a lot to me, thank you.

A couple of you were less kind in your support but offered support nonetheless. I also appreciate your words and time, and I accept your criticism without disagreement as well. Cheers.

I’m not going to give you any technical advice because there’s already a lot of suggestions already. I just wanted to leave a comment in solidarity.

I am the techiest person in my fairly techy group of friends, and even I often end up making silly mistakes that mess up my system sometimes. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, especially when there seems to be solutions to my problems that I’m not able to understand.

Trust me when I say that you’re not stupid for not getting this. This shit is difficult. I have been in your position so so many times before — right down to the despair making me feel suicidal. It’s hard when you desperately need to fix a thing, but the more you throw yourself at the problem, the harder it gets. Take as much of a break as you need to, and come back to some of the answers that sound promising, but you’re struggling to understand, and ask questions. You’re not dumb for not understanding — you’re new at this, and that’s okay.

I can’t speak for other people in this thread, but I know that when I’m giving technical advice to people, it often feels like I’m getting practice at communicating things in an accessible way. I want more people to be able to participate in this hobby that I enjoy, but I’ve been steeping in this environment for so long that sometimes, the advice that I give is overly dense, or it assumes knowledge that the person needing help doesn’t have. That’s an unfortunate mistake to make, because it makes the person reading my reply feel stupid, and that’s the last thing I want. I’ve found that giving technical advice online is often a mutual learning process — the person I’m helping is learning the tech stuff, and I’m learning how to communicate better. If you revisit some of the comments in this thread, bear that in mind — it’s not all on you.

On the topic of wishing you were stronger, I can relate to that — like I said, I’m pretty prone to getting myself into a spiral of shame when I don’t understand a thing and everything I do keeps getting worse. For what it’s worth, I think that asking for help as you have done here is something that requires a lot of strength; it’s hard to be vulnerable when you feel like you’re messing things up. It also takes strength to recognise that you’re getting overwhelmed enough that you need to take a step away. It’s valid to want to be stronger than you are now, but I hope you’re able to recognise your small achievements.

Finally, a small bit of practical advice that I’d give is that if you’re entering terminal commands or changing settings to try fix this, it’s super useful to make a note of what you’re doing. Sometimes when I have a complex problem and I try one potential solution that doesn’t end up working, the changes made in that solution can conflict with steps involved in attempting a second solution. It can make it easier to keep track of what you’ve tried so far, especially if you have to undo stuff later. It’s okay if you haven’t done this so far, but it can help going forward. I find that when I’m panicking and desperate for a solution, that makes me more likely to just attempt basically everything, and those are the times when keeping track of what I’ve done is especially important.

Don’t feel guilty for asking for help, or for needing clarifications. We’re all here of our own free will. Many of us have been in your position before, and only got to the point where we are now because of the patient help of kind online nerds. That’s a big part of why I try to chip in when I find someone with a problem I can help with — it feels like giving back to the community that helped me to learn back when I was new to this.

I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re doing well. Keep trying, and I promise things will get easier. Don’t beat yourself up for needing to take breaks, or for feeling overwhelmed. How you’re feeling right now is within the range of what’s normal for new people running into a difficult technical problem like this. You’re not stupid, this stuff is just hard.

Edit:

I’m too stupid for this. I don’t understand what anyone is saying, nothing is working. I don’t know what to do. I need to stay away for a few because if I don’t I’m going to kill myself. I’m very sorry and I appreciate everyone’s help, I wish I that I was smarter and I wish that I was stronger.

Drop the self-destructive overreacting bullshit and actually try to research the advice you’ve already been given. Degrading yourself this way helps absolutely nobody, so knock it the fuck off and start listening.

nothing is working

This phrase is pointless. Be more specific; this is part of the troubleshooting process. What exactly isn’t working? What have you tried? Are you just mashing the keyboard and expecting ✨something✨ to happen?

If you are going to change your entire operating system, you need to be prepared to troubleshoot things that you aren’t familiar with, and that requires patience. Slow the fuck down and start googling things you’re not familiar with. Actually participate in the process by asking follow-up questions, instead of repeatedly bashing yourself over the head just because you accidentally mistyped a command. Rome wasn’t conquered in a day, and you’re not going to fix this in 5 minutes by bashing your head into the keyboard over and over again.

I wish I that I was smarter and I wish that I was stronger.

“Getting smarter” means breaking your current understanding of certain things in order to relearn new things about whatever it is you’re trying to do. Your current understanding of how a computer works is broken, and now you’re being given a huge opportunity to relearn. Knowledge doesn’t just pop into your head. Knowledge is gained by putting in effort despite the frustrations you run into.

Good for you taking a break.

Here’s a few things I think you should know:

• You’re doing well, in your responses! This stuff is just hard to communicate about. You are succeeding in sharing information and asking questions. Keep it up.
• Everything I have seen in this thread indicates your computer can be fixed. I have broken mine worse more than once, and brought it back.
• Most of us have been in your shoes, with the same amount of fear, confusion and helpless feelings. So…uh…welcome to our little club. We get together sometimes and hang out (mostly virtually, admittedly).
• This sucks right now, but makes a hell of a story later.
• Everyone I know who is now way smarter than me, has a story like the one you’re having now. We learn by trying things. Sometimes we regret it for a few days.
• You can get through this. Breathe, take your time, and keep reaching out for help.
• None of us can pay back the folks who pulled our ass out of the fire when we were in your shoes, but we can keep helping you.

First take a deep breath, there are infinitely more ways to fuck up a system beyond repair and you are not even in the yellow zone.

1. Plug in the old usb stick
2. Go into BIOS and change boot order to usb
3. boot into live mode, there is usually an option to ‘try the os’ instead of installing it, do that
4. There download a new image, maybe mint or correct version of pop!
5. put in a new usb stick
6. use ‘dd’ to write the image to the new usb stick
7. reboot into the new usb stick and install the image

Hey, buddy. You seem to be panicking. Please, take a moment to calm down, go for a walk outside for half an hour.

Remember, you can’t fuck-up your computer by just messing with its OS and software (unless you know how, which you definitely don’t 😁). I would love to help you, but, unfortunately, the information you provided is not enough.

Please, answer some of these questions, at least:

• What were you trying to do?
• Why did you even decide to install Pop!_OS?
• Why did you decide to dual-boot with Windows?
• You seem to lack necessary knowledge for installing an OS in general. Did you follow a tutorial for this? Or did you ask an “AI” chatbot (like ChatGPT) for help?

If you can’t answer the last question, I am afraid only way to help would be someone experienced to investigate your computer in real life. If that’s not possible and you are okay with loss of data on that system, you can wipe it completely to install a fresh OS and start from beginning. I can help you make a choice in regards to the distro as well, if you tell me your hardware specifications.

I came here willing to help, but sorry – I just can’t parse what you write.
Take your time, the system isn’t gonna fuck itself any more in the next 30 minutes.

The only advice I can give is:
If you’ve already copy-pasted random terminal commands from Google results, do a fresh install.
Make sure you download the nVidia image from this page, unless you have a 1060 or older:
https://system76.com/pop/download/
Follow the official installation guide from the Popos website, NOT ANY OTHER SOURCE:
https://support.system76.com/articles/install-pop/
Best open it on your phone or another device, and go through it step by step, without skipping anything.

Take your time, drink a cup of tea or something.

First, calm down! There’s pretty much no way you broke your computer doing this, and unless you installed Linux over your C: drive by mistake, then you probably didn’t even accidentally lose any data.

I really thought I was doing it right and installing Pop to my second D drive to leave windows alone but somehow it completely broke Windows and I can load into that, only Pop!

Dual-booting is kind of a mess at the best of times. In the future I would recommend backing up ALL of your important data before doing anything involving partitions or OS installed, regardless of whether it’s Linux or Windows.

Assuming you didn’t install over your Windows install or anything like that, then your Windows partitions and stuff should still be there on your other drive. There are a couple of things you can try in order to confirm that your data is still where you left it.

1. Reboot your PC and press whatever key is needed to enter into your UEFI/BIOS menu OR your boot device selection menu. From there you should be able to try to instruct your computer to boot directly into whatever drive you think has Windows installed on it. If that works, you should still be able to boot into Windows (and then back up your important data!).

2. If for whatever reason you still can’t boot into Windows, another thing you can try is to “mount” your old Windows NTFS drive within Linux using something sudo mount /dev/YOURPARTITION /mnt, where YOURPARTITION is whatever NTFS partition your C drive is on (it’ll probably be something like “/dev/sdX” or “/dev/nvmeXnY”). Once you’ve mounted your C drive to /mnt, you should be able to use the cd and ls command to look around your files, at which point you should absolutely make sure that you make a backup copy of everything you care about before you proceed.

(To drive the point home, making a proper backup of your system before doing any OS-level stuff is not only a good idea, but in the future it’ll save you a lot of stress and/or heartbreak.)

Note: If mounting your NTFS fails, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything has gone terribly wrong. sometimes that can happen when Windows doesn’t shut down properly, leaving a flag in the wrong state. If that happens, you can still fix it, but that’s a different story.

I guess isn’t really my GPU (Nvidia 1080ti I think) so on my 4k monitor everything is blown up and the wrong aspect ratio, cutting off the bottoms of windows

I don’t know about PopOS specifically, but I would assume this is because NVidia dropped support for 10-series cards from their most recent Linux driver. I ran into a similar issue with my little 1060-3gb, recently, and it sucks. I solved it by upgrade to a RX 9060 xt, which works flawlessly.

If you’re not too afraid of the terminal, you should still be able to access a full-screen Linux terminal (called a TTY or virtual terminal) using Ctrl+Alt+F3. From there you’ll at least be able to control you computer and check that everything is still working and all of your data is safe. I don’t know enough about Pop to say if/how you can change the resolution or fix your driver situation from there… Ctrl+Alt+F2 usually brings you right back to the desktop, by the way.

I’ve tried some terminal stuff I’ve read online already but nothing has worked and I’m afraid to do the purge ~nnvidia command because it said it might turn my screen black and if I can’t even get into Pop! then I’m screwed.

I’ve never seen a driver situation that’s so broken that you can’t at least get into a TTY using Ctrl+Alt+F3.

Have you tried getting on your phone and visiting the PopOS discord or other chat rooms?

Nvidia is a bit notorious on Linux for being harder to set up. That said, Pop is a good choice and should mostly get things right.

It sounds like you have 2 issues:

1. Bootloader

2. Pop not getting resolution right

Both are certainly fixable, but 1 might seem more daunting.

1: Windows’ bootloader tends not to play nice with Linux. If you want to dual-boot (have both systems available), then the typical advice is to set up Windows first with only 1 drive plugged in. Then install your second drive, put Linux on it, and put the bootloader on the second drive. Then in BIOS, select drive 2 as your boot volume. It is easier to get the Linux bootloader to boot Windows than vice versa.

2: if you hit the Windows key, you should get the Pop launcher. Type “settings” and hit enter. Go to the Display tab and then change your resolution to something lower than now. You’ll have to move windows around to get where you need – use alt+drag to do that without the title bar visible.

Get another OS on a bootable USB—Cachy, Ubuntu, whatever—and install over Pop. This is like a 15 min process. The hardest part is making a bootable drive, you’ll just need access to another comp to throw another OS onto the USB, but then you’re done. Hell, use it as an opportunity to try out some different distros lol

You just need something on there that is 1080 friendly because you currently do not.

You could troubleshoot, but the best way to beat a broken fresh install is with a better fresh install, since you’re already there.

Once done, deal with whatever Window’s issue is after that, if it even still has one. Use GRUB moving onward.

I really thought I was doing it right and installing Pop to my second D drive to leave windows alone but somehow it completely broke Windows

Yeah, this is why I always recommend disconnecting drives you want left alone during the install process.

I’m afraid to do the purge ~nnvidia command because it said it might turn my screen black and if I can’t even get into Pop! then I’m screwed.

Good news, at worst it wrecks your graphics, you’ll still have the text command line. Does Pop support the nouveau driver? If you can switch to that one, you’d get a working desktop at least.

But what I would do from here is disconnect the Windows drive (and be very, very sure you have it right), then use the flash drive you used again and wipe and redo the Pop installation. You should be able to recover your stuff by reconnecting it later on (assuming you didn’t have Bitlocker enabled; if you did, you’ll have to use dislocker, and it’s a huge pain to use; or maybe you can use a windows live image and unlock and decrypt the drive).

Look up how to access the BIOS menu on your motherboard. (Should be able to look it up using your phone.) And then you should be able to change the boot order of your system so that it boots into your Windows drive. (If you don’t know which drive it is, just keep changing the order until it works.)

Usually, all you need to do is just rapidly press F2, F10, F12, or Delete after turning your system on. But like I said, look up your motherboard’s manual to be sure. Your motherboard model number will be on the motherboard itself.

Hey dude, I know lemmy is generally pretty anti AI (for various good reasons) but having read your other replies on this post, since you said you don’t know what help you need;

I think there are probably only two things which might help you quickly (since you seem to be in a hurry, understandably so if it’s your only computer):

1. find someone experienced with Linux who’s willing to get on a phone call with you and talk things through, diagnose and guide you step by step till you have a usable system again. I might be willing to be that person if you’re desperate and can’t find anyone else, I’m free ish for the next few hours.

2. use another device with a camera (eg smartphone) to access one of the multi modal llms eg Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude etc and get help from the LLM, with you describing everything you did so far as best as you can and what symptoms you’re seeing now, potentially sharing photos of what your hardware is and what you see etc. Follow things step by step and ask it to explain things as you go, try to learn throughout the process rather than just running things blindly.

Good luck! Try not to be put off by this experience, use it as an opportunity to learn more about how your tech works and help yourself be more prepared for recovery in future (eg always have a bootable Linux usb stick ready to hand)🙏

There aren’t many Linux problems that cannot be fixed in one way or another.

Even with the messed up resolution on Pop, can you connect to the internet and open a browser? From your desktop, usually you can press the Super (Windows) key on your keyboard, then type firefox and press enter to get the browser. Similar with “terminal” to get the terminal. From there you have a number of options.

Option 1. Couldn’t you try booting from the same USB you used to install Pop OS again? Then avoid the Proprietary graphics option, use Nouveau graphics instead then install the last version of the Nvidia driver that supports the 1080 ti.

Option 2. Get another USB stick you don’t need for anything else on hand. Download the software Balena etcher from https://etcher.balena.io/ go into file properties to make the program executable. Then download bazzite and get the version with old nvidia drivers. Then insert the USB and use Etcher to flash the disk image to it. Boot to the USB.

Option 3. Uninstall and reinstall an older version of the nvidia drivers in the terminal to try to salvage your current Pop OS! installation.