No display after install on HP Laptop

[luggw1]

I just installed 12.10 64-bit on my wife's HP G7 Pavilion Laptop. It's got an AMD A4 3300 processor with integrated Radeon graphics. The Live OS on a memory stick worked fine - no display problems, so I didn't expect to see any problems after installation. However, after installation finished, I get the grub menu, select Ubuntu and then nothing. I can tell there there is something there because if I let it sit for a while and then hit a key, the screen gets brighter like it's waking up, but there's no desktop. I also never see the boot screen after grub.

So, how can I get to see the boot process to see where something might be screwing up (I've tried ESC, but that doesn't work)? What else might I be able to do to make it work?

FWIW, 11.04 worked on the machine, but I couldn't get 11.10 to work because of a similar problem. I thought 12.04 was going to work, but never got around to installing it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Bill Lugg

[luggw1]

Well, I don't exactly know what I did, but while attempting to get into recovery mode, and pressing various keys, it began working. I proceeded to install the propriatary video driver first, followed by a restart and then updated the other packages, followed by another restart. Everything seems to work fine.

I wish I knew what I did, but I'm glad it worked.

Thanks for listening.
Bill Lugg