Your system's first boot on its own power is what electrical engineers call the “smoke test”.
If you are booting directly into Ubuntu, and the system doesn't start
up, either use your original installation boot media, or insert the
custom boot floppy if you have one, and reset your system. This way,
you will probably need to add some boot arguments like
root=
, where
root
root
is your root partition, such as
/dev/sda1
.