thanks a bunch funny my lilo.conf was different it had entries fo initird.gz and specific vmlinuz rather than the symbolic links.
Now my 2.6 kernel boots although I have no mouse, no sound and who know what else.

The wierdest thing is when it boots the screen goes completely blank like the laptop got shut off and then all of the sudden x pops up. None of terminal load messages are there. Any insight there would be great, i would say it is a video problem except that x seems happy enough when it loads. In fact I can't do a console login the screen just goes blank. Why would X be working but not the console screen???????