Sorry don't understand. You say the installation went well, but you could't load a gui? you mean you couldn't get past the login screen? (where you have to enter your name and password)

Please REBOOT your PC from hard drive.

Please see if you get a "grub2" menu before it goes "black"

Please tell us exactly what you see between power-on and when it goes "black"

Please try holding down <Ctl-Alt-F1> to see if you can get to a command-line login.

Do NOTHING else yet!!!!

Post back your results.

With your windows 7 Recovery Disk, you should have an option when it boots up to Repair your computer. When you click on that, you should get some system Recovery Options and the first one should be Startup Repair. If you get this, you should be able to get it repaired.

Let me attempt to clarify a few things. I cannot boot from a hard drive, do you mean boot from an external hard drive?
and yesterday everything seemed to work. i reinstalled ubuntu. the gui didn't load, but i didn't care because windows was working. Today, however, nothing works, i cannot boot off any hard drive, and all that shows is a black screen and a flashing cursor. Also, my recovery disk only has the option to either recover the computer, or restore to factory settings. There is no option for a commandline, or anything else.

Hi -
Yes, I meant the same drive you used to be able to boot Windows and Ubuntu from.

Please tell us ANYTHING that happens before it "goes black". If you killed the boot sector, I should think you'd see a message like "hard drive not found". Otherwise, you might be able to boot to a "virtual terminal" (with <Ctl-Alt-F1>, for example) and fix things from a command line.

That might actually be enough

CAN you boot from the Windows CD? Does it give you options like this? Have you tried "Startup Repair"?

ALSO:
Do you have a bootable Ubuntu CD? Have you tried booting from that?

I power on, black screen and blinking cursor. then gateway logo (press f2 to edit bios, etc), then after that, black screen and blinking cursor. nothing happens in between. what i described is what is happening.
my recovery disk doesn't have a startup repair option.
tell ya what, i'mma just return my computer, that'll save everyone a whole lot of trouble. unless anyone has a definite solution? haha