So I have been trying to boot 14.04 but I keep getting an error screen.
Some relevant information is that I wiped my hard drive because Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.04 both were not working properly.
I wanted my laptop just to have Ubuntu 14.04. I have looked into this problem before posting here and some suggest to boot from a live CD and work from there, but I do not have a live CD and do not know how to make one either.
Some brief google searches suggest this likely to be a problem with bad RAM, which could explain your previous issues with both Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.04.
My suggestion to confirm this would be to boot into a Linux distro (e.g. Ubuntu) off of some removable media and attempt to run a memory test for at least several hours.
If you have access to another computer, you could use UNetbootin in either Windows or Linux to create a bootable thumb drive of Ubuntu 12.04, and follow these instructions during boot to access the menu allowing you to test your RAM.
