@Brianb
If you come to black screen red cursor you where just one sec from workbenchscreen, which looks very promising.
EDIT
Paulone wrote this on some other place. This made it work on that machine.
Emergency mode use a different (older) kernel, which may be more compatible to your hardware. Please try this with your current installation: when loading, highlight a graphic mode in grub list, press E, replace "ATA=32bit" with "ATA=nopci" or "ATA=nodma" and press Ctrl+X (if I'm not wrong) to continue booting. You'd probably find a way to make Icaros perform better in disk operations.
