General :: Grub2 Setup On Ubuntu 10.04 Install

I have been asked to install Ubuntu 10.04 onto a friends machine but appear to be having some very basic problems. I think it may be related to the Grub 2. I do not consider myself a newbie but I am very inexperienced with Grub 2. I know a lot of the tricks of Grub Legacy, but this is driving me daft. It should be simple; a new hard drive, 500GB SATA, has been put into the computer, there are no other hard disks installed and the drive went in as empty.

Ubuntu booted fine into live CD mode without any issues, all of the hardware appeared to be working properly. I then installed it onto the machine, taking up the entire disk as per my friends request. When the installation finished everything seemed as normal, but upon startup I am greeted with a grub rescue prompt. Upon a bit of internet research I discovered that it may be simply that the 500GB is simply too big and that a seperate partition should be made for /boot.

This was done however now I do not even get to the grub rescue prompt after checking the DVD drive for bootable media the computer simply sits at a blinking cursor. I have made sure that grub 2 was installed and setup to look for the /boot partition but these all check out and I am still stuck with the same problem. I am considering simply installing 8.04 LTS and then updating and that should solve my issue of Grub 2, but I know that is avoiding the problem and I will need to learn about Grub 2 at some point.