I recently reinstalled windows on my laptop which of course overwrote grub. As I understand it booting up off the livecd and issuing a few instructions to grub via the command prompt can solve my problem.

However when I boot off of my livecd I get a really strange distortion. Other than recognizing the color on the screen as being the same colors as the default wallpaper there is abolutely nothing recognizable.

I tried hitting cntrl-alt-F1 for a virtual terminal and the screen when to black with little flashing white dots all over the screen. I might be able to just type in the commands there and get the desired result but I don't want to try that unless I can't find a solution to the display problem.

Messing around with the boot parameters I came across one "vga=771" which was listed and having something to do with laptop display problems but it had no effect that I could tell.

Try "vga=ask" for a menu of options, assuming the video isn't bad before that. Or if the kernel line already has a "vga=" entry, remove it.

What is the native resolution of the laptops screen?
I usually have luck with "vga=741".

My windows installation is pretty picky out running at 1366x768. Is the "vga=" option referencing the smaller number?

The display is fine when the 'loading bar' is showing. its when the window manager loads that it goes funky. I don't remember it doing that when I first installed linux. Pretty sure its the same disc. There are no issues with the installation itself either.

I'll try it with a few of those options as soon as I'm done with my project that I'm unfortunately doing in windows then report back.

Edit: Was something to do with the disc. I burned a new copy and had the bootloader fixed in less than 10 minutes.