graphical freeze on ubuntu server

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

this will be a bit of a long post, i'm sorry.

 

so i'm having a weird issue with an old server. 

 

specs:

2 opteron 252 cpu's

4gb of ddr ecc ram

nvidia geforce 6200 AGP

a couple old harddrives

 

 

now, i installed ubuntu server 17.04 32-bit on it, with no problems. i installed the GNOME desktop on top of that, and that's when i got problems. 

 

if i boot it up normally, it starts, tries to start gdm, and freezes. i'm not sure if it locks up completely, but the caps lock light doesn't work anymore.

i can start it up in recovery mode, and then it boots up into GNOME with no issues, other than laggyness and a 1280x1024 resolution, instead of 1080p.

i'm using it right now, and it's working fine. i tried to start it up normally again, but again, as soon as it tries to boot up gdm, freeze.

 

i tried to install the nvidia driver for the GPU, the legacy driver, but if i do that i can't boot up into GNOME using recovery mode or normally.

 

it's obviously a software problem, because it's working fine in recovery, but it's annoying because i can't reboot it remotely or anything, because then it will default to normal boot and freeze.