So I made a mistake. I've reinstalled the OS on computers dozens of times and never quite had this issue. I have the Lenovo SL510 and tried to reinstall using the dvd drive. I entered bios and changed boot settings so the dvd drive was first and then booted it up but it went straight into windows 7 on the hard drive. I tried again, hitting f12 at startup and specifically selected the DVD drive to boot from and again it would boot directly from the hard drive ignoreing the DVD drive completely. Finally I opened the DVD drive from windows and installed over top of the old OS, planning to delete the old files once the install finished.
The install went fine, everything worked, except I didn't have internet. Turns out that the wireless adapter wasn't being recognized. I opened device manager and it was showing up under "Other Devices" as Network Controller with a yellow exclamation mark. I then proceed to track down and install the wireless drivers after connecting with an ethernet cable. I tried the intel chipset program and it would fail to install the correct driver, I tried the lenovo support program and it failed to install the driver, I manually downloaded and installed the driver and nothing happened. I tried several different wireless drivers and the result was always the same. I was working on the issue for at least 8 hours.
Finally I decided it wasn't worth the trouble, and why not reinstall again. This time I created a bootable USB drive and went through the same process, changed boot order, no result booted from hard drive, pressed f12, selected the USB drive, same result. Finally I installed the new OS image over the existing OS from the USB while the computer was on.
Installing the OS over the older OS was definitely a mistake, but it seems like the core of the problem was that the computer just wouldn't boot from anything other than the hard drive itself I didn't realize the implications that this presented and during the final install of the OS from the USB the computer restarted during installation. Of course.. the computer did not reboot from the USB which meant it simply came up black screen, the OS had already been wiped from the hard drive, but it could not boot from the USB and therefore simply comes up blackscreen.
The first thing I tried to do was reboot into BIOS, wasn't happening. When I attempted to access bios it would simply blackscreen with the power on indefinitely. I obviously tried booting and using f12 several times to try switching back and forth from USB to DVD and so on, but everything just black screened.
So..... Help? If the computer couldn't boot from USB or DVD then the only option was to boot from inside the original OS, but doing that caused a massive driver error which I couldn't resolve no matter what I did. And now I'm thinking the computer is completely lost. The only idea I have is to try using a friends computer to install an OS on to the SL510's hard drive and then resintall the hard drive into the Laptop to see if it will boot from it. I've poured over this entire forum and found lots of similar issues but no one seems to be offering any answers or solutions besides an occasional "we're looking into it" message.