Ok, so I have been having quite a bit of difficulty getting a custom kernel to work. Today I think I made some progress. When I first boot my kernel, I get a black screen with a white cursor blinking in the bottom right corner. After a while my system continues to boot. Everything is fine until I try to turn off the computer. As root I run "poweroff" the computer starts its shut down procedure until it gets to the end of it, which is to turn off the computer. The last thing it says is acpi_power_off. The computer just stays like this. Can someone help me with these problems? Thanks in advance for your help.

The first problem, the black screen, is because something is wrong with the framebuffer. In /boot/grub/menu.lst, if you have "vga=<something>" on the kernel line, just remove it. It should boot up with standard vga resolution. It isn't pretty, but at least you will be able to read the boot messages.

The second problem is related to acpi. You can try adding "nolapic" to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst It means "no local apic". It seems to have fixed others similar problems: http://lists.debian.org/debian-lapto.../msg00175.html

Well I tried the solution to the second problem and that didn't work. Regards to the first solution, here is my menu.lst entry for my kernel
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.9-mike
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-mike root=/dev/hdb1 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.9-mike
savedefault
boot

there is no vga=.

I have no idea what to do now. Any more help is appreciated.