New installation of ubuntu 12.04.2 server edition will not boot from hard disk

[compdoc]

> Yes, also good point about fd0

In the bios, is the floppy set to boot first? Might want to look at the boot order. On machines that used floppies, I generally leave the floppy controller enabled, while setting the floppy type to none. 

If you have an IDE drive, making the boot drive Primary Master might help if there's a problem booting. And for the best speed, be sure to use those 80 wire ultra ide cables.

For server, I never use LVM. Just let it use the whole partition as it wants, which is usually a main partition and a swap. Ubuntu runs well from the installer's defaults. 

Server boots and runs pretty quickly before you start installing services, so it going to be as minimal a version of Ubuntu as it gets these days. If you solve your booting problem, then it's certainly worth a try to get it working...