I am trying to install Kubuntu on my Mac Mini 2010 Core 2 Duo with 2 gigabytes of ram. I have tried to do so on both my internal drive and a new external drive, but both end up with a broken grub. It's not broken as in grub rescue, but it's totally broken and no commands, not even "reboot", will work.

I can boot from the partition that it was supposedly installed to and I get the broken grub. In order to boot from the external hard drive I burned an rEFIt disk and booted from the external drive. It gives the same broken grub. When I installed grub to the external drive I chose to partition the disks manually and for the grub install location I chose "sdb" which is my external hard drive. I did not totally overwrite the harddrive with Kubuntu. I already had an HFS+ partition for Time Machine backups in Mac OS X. In Mac OS X's disk utility I resized that partition so there was ~100 GB of free space. In the Kubuntu installer I created a 1 gigabyte swap partition and made the rest of the free space an ext4 partition.

What is weird, though, is that when I booted a live system rescue cd and used the grub command in a terminal I did "root (hd1, 3) and it said that the filesystem was ext2fs. But the grub will not recognize any other partition's filesystems.

I had no problems installing Ubuntu a while back on this machine. Can anyone help me? I really want to get Kubuntu running. Thanks.