Okay, so I trawled through the BIOS settings, and changed one thing that caught my eye... booted up and GRUB loaded fine! >.>

The option was titled "Onboard Serial Port 1" and had the default setting of "3F8/IRQ4", which when I selected, shown various similar settings, plus an "auto". I selected auto, saved, rebooted, and wham, it works!

Please help me make sense of what happened here, and why the default setting halted my boot up.

Also, I still have the problem of Ubuntu not starting without going through Recovery. If I boot Ubuntu as you would, I get an Aubergine screen and nothing more. Any help here?
I thought it may be a graphics problem, but I have the driver installed.