I extracted the .iso onto a disk, and tried to boot from it. For the longest time, it wouldn't even boot, instead, it would bypass it and boot from the hard drive, until I swapped my newer disk drive for an older one. When I finally got it to boot, I got the black screen. Ran it on text mode and saw it hang on kernel_thread_helper+0x6/0x10.
After a little digging, I managed to get it to install by setting nolacpi on. When it restarted after install and attempted to boot it from the hard drive, it got to grub and... black, blank, backlit Screen of Doom. After trying to run recovery mode, it gave me this error:
BUG: unable to handle kernel
That's it! No "NULL", no "paging request", nothing else. Above it, it has lines saying: (I've only put down about half of the visible screen)
io scheduler noop registered
io scheduler deadline registered
io scheduler cfq registered (default)
pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Play PCI Core version: 0.5
pciehp: PCI Express Hot Plug Driver version: 0.4
input: Sleep Button as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNPOCOE:00/input/input0
ACPI: Sleep Button [SLPB]
input: Power Button as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXPWRBN:00/input/input1
ACPI: Power Button [PWRF]
BUG: unable to handle kernel
I've been searching the web for help, and I've seen that apparently some possible causes of the black screen (though maybe not the causes of my problem) are old/bad video drivers, and a faulty power supply. I've had trouble with my power supply before, as the fan had gotten irreparably stuck, so I replaced it with another, and I haven't had trouble since.
After seeing this, I put an NVidia card in, and when I booted, the screen was larger. (meaning that the grub text was smaller.) It seemed like it fully utilized the large screen I have. The second time I got onto grub (I still couldn't boot), it was the way it looked before adding the card. The third time, it had no purple background, and it was very small, like 640x480. It also appeared to have really slow screen refresh rates, almost 24 fps. The fourth time, it was super large again! From the fifth time and onwards, it has been the BnW, small grub.
At this point, I decided to reinstall. However, even after turning on nolacpi, it would load, and then eventually hang at the screen with the red/white dots and the Ubuntu logo. I did more searching and decided to erase quiet splash vt.handoff=7, which gets me the old kernel_thread_helper hang, (booting from the hard drive, now, and not in recovery mode), and doing that and adding apci=off gets me to the unable to handle kernel error.
