So here's the lowdown:

I decided that I wanted to go ahead and get the latest kernel (unstable) just for the fun of it and did a dist-upgrade. Well, my ati drivers went haywire, and I tried to fix them but only managed to uninstall gnome desktop. So, I reinstalled gnome and everything (I think everything) I used to have with the exception of ATI. I tried to change xorg.conf to get video back and tried just about every driver available but no go. Actually I made things worse. I cannot boot into just command prompt because gdm is autoloading and I don't have a failsafe choice in grub.

So my long term goal is to get gui back. Here's where I am right now:

I deleted the xorg.conf file thinking it would disable gdm and x and would show only command prompt. Well it kind of does but it tried to fit 4 screens into one and i can't read the command prompt, it just looks like a mess of lines. I can type stuff but I can't read it because it is so small the screen won't display it.

How can I get just into command prompt? I need to get back to a regular prompt that I can read so I can make modifications. Please help

Which ATI driver were you using before? If it was an ATI proprietary driver then you have to rebuild it (using module-assistant) for your new kernel. Please let us know what driver you use.
cheers,
jdk

I had the latest one from their website because I had upgraded that before the dist-upgrade. I already have it rebuilt into a deb package but I can't get back to command prompt to try and re-install it. I tried to re-install right after dist-upgrade, when I still had console, but I was getting an error. I need to get back to a single screen showing the terminal so I can get back to fixing the rest of the mess. I have some files I don't want to lose otherwise I would have just re-installed. Thanks for the reply.

Can't you reboot in safe-mode (console only; no gui) and do it that way? That should be easy enough since you don't need to use any gui stuff to build and reload a new module.
cheers,
jdk

Well that's my problem. I don't know how to get only to safe-mode. I don't know what commands to pass to grub to get only console.

You need to reboot. I assume you are using grub. When you get to the blue menu part you will see an option for booting in "single user mode". Select that item and hit return and then your problems are over!
cheers,
jdk

Well kind of over. Single user mode actually tries to autoload gdm so when gdm crashes it doesn't return to console only. I will try it one more time. Let me reboot.

What@!@!@??? Unless you have a very weird setup that shouldn't be happening. You get to a point where the system stops booting and asking you to supply a root password for maintenance mode. So that's what you have to do. If you just hit return at that point it will carry on booting normally. Sorry I didn't mention that.
jdk

OK. Thanks for that. Here's what happened:

Single User asked for root password. I put it in. Then it hung at eth1: link not ready after 180seconds. I pushed CTRL+C and got to console. I was able to dpkg -i fglrx-driver_....deb package and then I did aticonfig --initial. So far so good.

I then did startx and here's what I got:
<code>
(EE) Failed to load module "glx" (module does not exist, 0)
(EE) module ABI major version (0) doesn't match the server's version (2)
(EE) Failed to load module "dri" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//fglrx_drv.so: unidentified symbol pciNumBuses
(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//fglrx_drv.so
(EE) Failed to load module "fglrx" (loader failed, 7)
(EE) No drivers available

Fatal server error:
no screens found
</code>

That's because you need to rebuild the driver with module-assistant in order to have one that's compatible with your new kernel. All the fglrx-driver deb gives you is the source. m-a will use that to build the module but you must have the kernel-headers for your new kernel and you need to remove the old fglrx-kernel deb from /usr/src. You should also delete the /usr/src/modules/fglrx folder. Then you can build the new driver for your current kernel. I repeat, just installing the deb packages provided by the ati-driver-install is not enough. You have to build the module for the new kernel.
cheers,
jdk

Ok. I will go ahead and try that. Thank you for the help. I will let you know how it goes.

Yes, please do that. Full marks for persistence. Think of how good you'll feel when you succeed
cheers,
jdk

So i'm having some errors in apt-get -f install which is a prerequisite to module-assistant prepare. I think it has to do with the fglrx drivers from the debian repositories. I also can't seem to install the fglrx-kernel-src_*.deb because it is conflicting with the other package from the debian repositories. How do I disable repositories for now and how do I re-enable them for later? If I disable the repositories, can I still do apt-get -f install or will that not work?

By the way, thanks for all the help. I'm a lot further along than when I started.

I would remove ALL the fglrx packages using and then reinstall the latest packages you have from the ATI site. That should clear up matters somewhat.
cheers,
jdk

Can I just do aptitude remove fglrx*?