Ubuntu will not start

**garandcarbine** · January 15th, 2012

First off, hi. I'm GarandCarbine. Just call me Chris. OK, now that that's outta the way, on to the matter at hand...

I'm fed up with Windows 7. So I decided to switch to Ubuntu. I tried it for a bit, and loved it! So I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10. I installed it, removing my Windows installation and formatting that drive. It tells me install completed successfully, but when I start the computer up, it just sits there. No GRUB, no Ubuntu, not even an error saying that it couldn't load the operating system. It's acting like there's just nothing there. I've reinstalled it several times, trying different things. When I first installed it, I formatted the drive with 2 partitions: a 4096MB swap area, and the rest of the drive as ext4 Journaling file system. Then I tried doing the upgrade option (read somewhere that that helps sometimes) with the same configuration. That didn't work, so I tried three partitions. one 4096MB swap, another 2048MB ext4 specifically for the bootloader (I'm assuming that is GRUB), and the rest of the drive as ext4. Everything I tried ends with the same result. Blank screen, blinking cursor. Absolutely no sign of either GRUB, Ubuntu, or anything. I've even tried pressing F6, F8, pressing Shift repeatedly, holding Shift, all while booting (not at the same time, of course). I've also tried ctrl+alt+F1, ctrl+alt+F4, et cetera, and nothing does anything!