FC6 black screen on boot

FC6 install on eMachines T5216 PentiumD.
Two Seagate Baracuda 160gb SATA drives will be set up
as Raid level ?.
No errors except network not connected.
I get a black screen with sprinkled ascii chars.
This machine has a vanilla onboard video???
I know little about Linux but I have installed and used
RedHat 9 on a windows file server which has run for
years.
Is there a video command line I can use at boot to get
FC6 to come up with some kind of usable GUI?

thanks.

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