[ubuntu-uk] Borked my Mac installing Ubuntu 11.04, now blackscreens & beeps on restart then takes exactly 4 attempts to boot

[doug livesey]

So guess who broke his Mac trying to install the latest Ubuntu?
Every now & then, I think I'm more of a geek than I really am, and try to do
something to make myself feel hardcore, but that ends up just being plain
humbling!
There follows a cut & paste from a post I left on the Ubuntu forums, but
basically I've been stung by over-ambitious early-adopter's syndrome (which
may or may not be a real term, I've been trying to fix my computer for the
last 2 days straight & can't remember how humans actually talk to each
other).
Anyway, in the hope that some local talent may see this & know what's going
wrong ...

Hi -- I've tried to install 11.04 on my Macbook Pro (5,4) today.
I had two drives in the machine, an SSD as my main drive, and an HD.
I installed rEFIt before attempting to install Ubuntu.
I moved my Snow Leopard install to the secondary HD & made sure I could boot
to it.
Then, I used the live CD & gparted to clear the 1st drive (the SSD), create
the swap space, create the Ubuntu partition, and launch the install, where I
used what I had just created on the SSD.
The install completed okay (but with no option to select where the GRUB
installer went, like some tutorials tell you to look out for).
This seemed to go okay, so I went to restart at the end of the install, but
the machine didn't come back up.
Instead, the power came on & I could hear the drives, but the screen stayed
black, the battery light flashed a load of times really quickly (too quickly
to count, but at least 10 times), and then the machine let out 1 long beep
and stayed on the black screen.
I forced it to power down & tried again, and just got a black screen, the
battery light shining steadily, and no beep.
I forced it to power down again, and got the same, then again, and got the
same, and then a 4th time, which actually allowed me to boot.
And this has been the pattern since then. I shut down, and my first attempt
to restart gets me the flashing light and the beep, with the black screen. I
try 3 more times to power down and restart, and just get the black screen.
Then, *every* time on the 4th time, I'm allowed to boot.
The same routine will be gone through the next time I power down and try to
restart.
I've tried totally clearing the disk in gparted, restoring the OSX install
from TimeMachine, everything I could think of, but all to no avail.
Finally, thinking that maybe the OSX install I had safe on the secondary HD
might still be okay (looking at it in gparted showed an EFI boot section &
everything), I opened up my MBP, swapped the drives around so that the HD is
now the main drive, and the SSD the secondary, and renamed the drives so
that the primary HD is now called 'Macintosh HD' and is first in the list of
drives that appear when I manage to boot each 4th attempt.
But, to my great disappointment, I still got exactly the same error.
Can anyone offer any advice on how to:
1) Get my machine booting to a safe Snow Leopard install on the (now
primary) HD?
2) Safely install Ubuntu on the (now secondary) SSD?
Obviously the first is a top priority, as I need my machine in order to
work!
Then I can concentrate on moving my dev environment to Ubuntu, which I've
been dying to do for ages.
Thanks very much for any & all assistance.

Bed, now. I hate going to sleep defeated, but I've no idea what else to do.
'Night!
   Doug.

PS -- apologies to any Geekuppers for the cross post.
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