Freaksta, I ran into a strange problem installing on my Craigslist-acquired laptop, and your problem seems to be somewhat mirroring it.

I used "nomodeset" because I hate using the framebuffer as a console. On my older computers on 14.1, this resulted in graphics when X started up, and regular INT10 console when outside of X. HOWEVER, on this machine (Sandy Bridge with NVIDIA Optimus) with 14.2 (I mention this because I don't know whether the problem is the machine or newer graphics drivers and their KMS dependencies), I was getting all sorts of crashes and problems when trying to start X or even just booting, with weird errors in the dmesg log. I forget exactly where I found it, but I got the hint somewhere that newer drivers didn't like even booting up with KMS and the framebuffer disabled like that. Removing "nomodeset" upon the next boot resulted in all my problems going away, both the dmesg bugs and upon starting X. Optimus also works, in my case using the "xrandr --setprovideroffloadsink" option as discussed by the Nouveau team at:

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Optimus

Once this is done, power usage also goes way down as the NVIDIA GPU is fully powered-down, to the point that this laptop (i7-2670qm) will idle without running the fan at all!

Hope this helps.