screen looks like static on gui bootup
 

I just installed Fedora 9 on my internal drive (after I kept getting segfaults when trying to run Sabayon, but that's another story...).

The install seemed to go fine. When I tried to boot though, I get some messages saying "ACPI: Error attaching device data" (4 or 5 of those), and some other text (like "Press I for interactive bootup", things like that). Then the screen gets messed up and starts looking like static. If I press ctrl+alt+f1, I get to the screen that listed the ACPI errors, but if i got back to the "gui" with ctrl+alt+f8, I get the static again.

btw, I have an ATI card (hd 4870x2), if it matters.

Anyone know why this is happening and/or how to fix it?

Any and all help is appreciated!

Go to your bios.

Try modifying settings relating to video bios


Also go to www.phoronix.com for reviews on your card

Optional: post details of lspci -vvv

I tried playing around with some of the bios settings but they didn't help. Is there something specific I should be looking for?

Also, where would I run lspci -vvv? It doesn't work in the Windows command line or in grub, and I don't have access to a fedora command line.

You should be able to login to a bash shell by pressing Ctrl_Alt-F2 - Ctrl_Alt-F6 at any time. These are the first 6 (including the default Ctrl_Alt-F1) virtual terminals. From the bash commandline, you can run any non-X programs, including lspci. Other tools that may be of diagnostic value would be dmesg, cat /var/log/messages, cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Better still, use another working computer to ssh log in to your F9 computer, so you can use copy/paste to report interesting results back here.
--- rod.

Going to any of the virtual terminals just leads me back to the screen that gave me the ACPI errors (and other info). I can type, but pressing enter just goes to a new line, and doesnt execute the command. I also dont think I'm actually at a virtual terminal, because pressing ctrl+alt+f(1-6) doesn't do anything. If I type the letter a and just leave it there, it'll be in all the "other" 6 screens too.

Okay, it seems that you are not getting a complete enough boot that the virtual terminals will work. Perhaps you can try booting to runlevel 3 to see if the graphics is the real foul-up, or if there is something else happening first that just make the graphics look like the faulty element. If you get a clean boot, then you can try starting X from there, with startx.
--- rod.