I just had an SSD installed ino my late 2008 macbook air. The old drive was clicking, hard drive failure was eminent, and it was time to replace and upgrade.

I picked up the blank computer from repair show, threw my ubuntu usb stick in and there was some "NTFSB ctrl + alt + delete to restart" error. I wrote the exact acronym down somewhere else and can find it tomorrow if needed (moved passed that with new error now!).
I then tried hooking up my apple super drive and ubuntu liveCD. Same error. I decided to burn the DVD again at the slowest speed imaginable. LiveCD booted... YAY. So I thought. Ran through installation (made 3 partitions, swap, /, /home). Disk ejected and on reboot I have a grey screen and a blinking folder with a question mark inside of it.

I've been trying all sorts of solutions from google like hold down "c" while rebooting (which lets me connect to my wifi but nothing else). The big issue is that I can't seem to boot into the liveCD on DVD or USB! With discs and USB's that work in other machines!

My searches lead me to believe the system can't find something needed for boot... Is this something the computer shop that installed the new SSD did or is something else going on with software that I can fix?

Thanks.