Ubuntu – Grub always fails to install, furthest I get is grub> prompt

Tried to install 10.10 yesterday and eventually got an error that Grub had failed to install. Asked me to select another partition, cancel install or continue without a bootloader.

Everytime I selected another partition the error would just pop back up immediately (not convinced it even tried writing anything to disk).

I did do some partitioning when I was in the installer – shrunk an ntfs partition and grew the Linux one to make up for it – the defaults were set to place at beginning of drive and logical (as opposed to primary), so I left it with that.

The first time grub just went to the recovery prompt – but most of the commands that were 'supposed' to work, didn't (been reading articles and how-tos). After another reinstall and an attempt to install manually I got through to the grub> prompt, but have failed to get much further.

I've checked the grub directory and there's no grub.cfg anywhere, but it's definitely 1.9x that's installed. There should be no Legacy Grub installations anymore, that I'm aware of.

Have gone through various methods to try and load a kernel or configure grub but they've all been unsuccessful.
For example: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275

EDIT:

Sorry, you're right, I should have been clearer, left a lot of space for assumptions there. Was writing it while researching/rebooting.

I have actually managed to work around it, but I will get back with that partition table 'cause I'm pretty sure something is wrong somewhere – still unable to get the distro installer to install grub, as it should.

Using Ubuntu Linux. Was failing to get past the grub> prompt because I wasn't loading the initrd image. Did that and I was flying. Just ran update-grub once I got into Ubuntu proper.