System booting issues

[sosaudio1]

I have LM5 on my Dell Dimension 2400. It has the dreaded Intel845 gfx card and I think it is using the 915 drivers...I say this because in order to boot of recent, I had to go to recovery mode...now get this....I don't need to do anything here but tell it to resume boot. So this of course boots in text mode and it tells me that the 915 drivers are not configured....does not stop booting here either...it continues on booting.....

Now....couple of questions, how do I need to configure that card...or....do I...reason is that when it boots, it is at the best res for my Dell 17" monitor.

Let us back up further. Upon installing LM5 on the Dell, when I booted, I didn't get the progress bar splash screen. It would start normally and you could see the hard drive working, you could see it seek out the floppy and then the log in screen. While this is going on....screen is black....I wanted to see that progress bar splash screen so I installed Start-Up Manager which allows me to set resolution for the progress bar splash and therefore, see it. It worked for a bit...now I get, this:

Normal start normal Kernel
(at this point you can see the LCD going thru different changes in resolution...nothing fancy....you just see the LCD cycle)
Next progress bar splash (resolution set at 1024X768 by 8bit to get it to start without the out of parameter error screen
So now we watch the progress, goes through and then we go to a black screen and it hard locks

Power off by power button, restart by power button, select recovery mode....text start....screen asking what I want to do...select resume start-up. Text boot still and then...voila....login screen and best screen resolution.

My question is....what is causing it to lock up? Would getting the 915 config fix that? Is there a problem with start-up manager?

Thanks for any and all help you can give here.....incidentally, this is the reason why I am not running LM6. Can't get the LiveCD to boot to install...again....Error with Ibex (Ubu 8.10) so I wonder if the two problems are inter-related.

Soo sorry for the long post but I want to get this system at 100% or as close to it as I can.

Sort of a double post, but I think I put this post in the wrong place at first anyway...LOLOL

Thanks
Rich

[sosaudio1]

anybody?

I am beginning to think this is an ACPI problem considering how the resume normal boot works....It may also be with all the switching to different resolutions that the gfx card is getting locked and locking up....but I dont know if this would account for the total sys hard lock....