I ran into a similar issue with a black screen in Ubuntu, seemingly a result of driver issues too. It turns out the normal installation wasn't partitioning enough space for it to run in (I installed it alongside Windows 7). I had to manually partition the disk to give it ample room. Once I did that, everything ran just fine. Along the way I encountered a lot of advice similar to what you did, and it set me back several hours before I realized what the actual cause was.
Super guilty of this. I'm a novice to Linux, so I didn't really know this was a thing (until now!) That said, I'm glad this was posted so that going forward I will be mindful of the risks and can mitigate them.
