Thanks for the tip Lucio. - and no i wasnt able to boot to the LiveCD. I have ubuntu installed now - but i believe the same problem exists as i cant boot into it I was able to get 8.10 amd64 installed now but i still have something wrong with the boot process. when i booted with quiet it showed me: Marking TSC unstable due to TSC halts in Idle (see attached jpeg) Googling gave me the tip to acpi=off as an installer option - that worked and ubuntu installed! yea! but.. Booting into Ubuntu just shows a black screen now. The first time i booted into Recovery Mode, it brought me to the options screen and i chose "resume normal bootup" and it worked and i was at the ubuntu desktop and everything worked beautifully. i thought maybe i didnt give it enough of a chance to boot originally so i tried again and it just sat and hung indefinitely. Subsequent tries to boot into Recovery Mode froze at the second to last line on the screenshot: "ACPI: Thermal Zone [DTSZ] (58 C)" - this doesnt seem to be an error, but this seems to be where its halting. -- mv 315.952.5753