Hmm i seemed to have solved my own problem, i disconnected all unnessicary things and now grub loaded fine...
now however, i'm having a big issue getting my ethernet card to work.
so far i've assigned it an ip address using the following
ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.10 netmask 255.0.0.0 up
that seemed to work, and i can ping the machine from my laptop...
however i check the dhcp client list on the router, and the machine wasn't listed, and i still can't access any sites to pull down the packages... so i'm stuck in console and can't do much.
any tips or links? i will rtfm if i can find one that will help me
thanks