As I said, you didn't give any info on the system that you are trying to boot on, so I am hard pressed to make a good guess, You might benefit from nodma on an older system. You might need apic=off. I had one system that on some older versions of Knoppix needed noscsi. Or it might be that your screen is blank because your monitor is being run beyond the range that it supports and you need to force a resolution and, usually more importantly, refresh rates within the monitor's range. Some very new video cards don't have good drivers yet and the vesa code helps them. Knowing which works, if any, will take some testing on your part.