Blank screen with blinking cursor after install

I find that sometimes when I install Ubuntu 11, I get a blank screen with a blinking cursor... what's wrong?

Following this answer

• Press shift during boot
• e to edit entry (quiet splash to text)
• F10 to boot
• got black screen without cursor

Then tried from another answer

• replace quiet splash to xforcevesa (what does this do?)
• got same blank screen without cursor

Then I tried boot into recovery, then update GRUB entries. That works, but when I restart, I'm back to square one.

Solution 1:

Try editing the boot entry and placing "nomodeset" (without the quotes) as an option.

Solution 2:

I too had this blank screen issue for my encrypted LVM setup. I found out that grub was installed on my usb installation drive instead of my hard disk. After re-installing grub onto my disk, I no longer get the blank screen. See my adventures here.