Okay, I've looked over the forums and tried as many cheatcodes as I can get my hands on, but nothing has seemed to work beyond a very limited level.

I have:
Averatec 3700 series notebook
AMD Sempron Mobile, 1800Mhz
480M RAM

I can get into X via failsafe, but it doesn't help much without mouse or network support. No amount of keyboard shortcuts can get me to a command prompt.

Beyond that, autodetection hangs on every single boot, even with failsafe. The BIOS in that particular notebook doesn't have much in the way of options, but the cheatcodes I've used to try to get around this don't seem to do much.

I can't run lspci for more verbose info, as I can't reach a command prompt. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.