Debian Hardware :: Nvidia Driver Causing Black Screen

I have a system running a fairly new copy of Stretch. I have an nvidia Geforce 210 (on my desktop)

Code: Select allVGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216 [GeForce 210] (rev a1)

Previously running Squeeze I was using the proprietary driver and never had any issues. Now using the nouveau driver video playback of mp4 files is glitchy and programs like google earth don't operate smoothly. I installed the nvidia driver from the repositories based on this guide, used nvidia-xconfig to generate an xorg.config file. I made sure noeveau was blacklisted and rebooted my machine.

I was greeted with a black screen. So I booted up in recovery mode, used telinit 2 (side note: what happened to /etc/inittab???) to change to a runlevel that doesn't start X, and confirmed that nouveau was, in fact, not loaded. Typed startx and without any errors or warnings the screen went black. ctrl+alt+fN wouldn't bring me back to a terminal, but hitting the power button did shut down X and halt the machine.

I'm not really sure how to go about debugging this as I get no useful output from anything, just a blank screen and that's it.

For the time being I just blacklisted the nvidia driver and let the system boot with nouveau; I'd still like to get the nvidia driver working properly, though. I've always just downloaded the driver right from nvidia and installed it, but I know that isn't the best way to do it. I'd rather not screw up a brand new system, it's so nice and fast with the new SSD.