First, let me say that this isn't as bad as the title makes it sound. I am posting this to help anybody else who has this problem.

My sound cut out so I used alsamixer to play with the settings to see if it would help. Without changing the settings back I had almost everything at max volume. I restarted, guessing that it would fix the problem. I was correct. The incredibly loud feedback from the mic was incredibly loud and my gazelle wouldn't boot. I had just installed lots of things and didn't know where to start.

It turns out that the speakers (one of which is directly above the hard drive) were messing with the rest of the system. They were giving me hard drive errors and errors about tty1 respawning too fast.

The solution was to put a pillow over the keyboard to eliminate the feedback for as much of the booting process as I could. With the pillow in place, the system would boot. However, when the pillow was taken away, everything would go slow, lock up, or perform unexpectedly.

Hope this can help somebody in the future!