I am tri-booting Mac OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard), Windows 8, and Ubuntu. I installed via a USB drive. The install and the LiveCD trial went flawlessly, and I can boot into GRUB. However, as soon as I press Enter on the installed Ubuntu, it brings me to a black screen. I left it there for about an hour, and it was still black. No words or anything. I tried 13.04, and that worked, but it wasn't 100% compatible, so I much prefer the LTS. So far, I have tried:
- Failsafe Graphics
- Reinstalling
- Putting nomodeset and no splash in GRUB
- The custom Mac LiveCD (wouldn't boot from the USB drive)
- Adjusting my brightness (believe it or not, that's a common solution)
- Switching graphics mode through GRUB (got a garbled mess, but I think Unity was running in there somewhere because my backlit keyboard lit up)
- Entering --quiet splash nomodeset and quiet splash nomodeset (brought me to the splash screen with orange dots, then kicked me back out to a totally black screen)
- Pressing Esc during the splash screen (gave me a bunch of checks, all came back [OK], but kicked me to the black screen again)
Keep in mind, I'm kind of a beginner. I know much more than the average beginner, but I wouldn't call myself intermediate just yet.
One more thing: the black screen I'm getting is NOT backlit, and there is NO blinking cursor. It looks as if I turned the computer off, but the fans are still running and I think the hard drive is still doing something)