It seems that you got it to boot successfully but the desktop doesnt work completely (you say get a mouse cursor, you also get that too when booting with -f or -x?) so I would suspect the problem is related to the graphics, that Atom boards got Intel 950 Onboard graphics I think, so maybe you need to add or mod some of the Intel graphics kexts to boot even in safe mode. I got no experience with Intel at all, but I would find out if you need some graphics injector for the specific Intel card you got there.