Grub screen is scrambled after upgrade to 11.10

i upgraded up ubuntu 11.10 and that was a nightmare. it couldn't find a dependency and when i did a sudo aptitude upgrade it said ti would have to remove 355 packages including ubuntu-desktop to resolve the issue. well i did this and tried to rebuild the system by hand so that failed too. then i downloaded the 11.10 ubuntu studio livecd and install it fresh but i kept my home partition in tact. (ahh proper partitioning) any ways i'm presented with a hideous grub screen. its just a few distorted lines across the screen then after a while it boots to a black screen which shows services being started also cant get a display manager like lightdm or gdm to display. getting a ipmi failed error and then it hangs at checking battery state. if it help the laptop has a nvidia card in it. and i can get a a tty terminal so any help will be appreciated.