Boot problems after installing

I have installed Red Hat Linux 9 on a Packard Bell Easy Note laptop. When i have finished installing it says congratulatons etc and tells me to reboot the system to begin. I do this and everything starts up ok, i then get a black screen with white writing while it performs various checks. The writing then starts scrolling very fast which i have read is supposed to happen. Unfortunately this doesn't stop, eventually it will just restart and do it again. I have noticed that while it is doing the checks it puts "ok" in green letters after various stages. One of the stages, though, has the word "Failed" in red letters. I have now sorted this out, however, the scrolling still continues. I put in my installation disk and went to linux rescue and from there went to a command shell. I typed in "startx" and the following came up:

Hostname lookup failure

Fatal server error
Cannot open log file "/var/log/XFree86.0.log"

giving up
xinit: No such file or directory (errno2): unable to connect to x server
xinit: No such process (errno3): Server error.

PLEASE HELP ME

use your rescue disk or whatever to edit the file /etc/inittab (im pretty sur ethis is the 1 u want to chaneg runlevels). In my one the first non-commented line reads
"id:5:initdefault:"

yours will probably be the same. change the 5 ot a 3 and reboot. This should boot you into a text terminal instead of X, from here you might be able to fix ur system.

note: make sure u are editing the file on your haddrive and not a temp file generated by the rescue program.