First a question, when booting your system, do you see the initial silo message of type
It must come first. If not, silo is misconfigured.
If you have a misconfigured kernel I would propose to do the following steps:
* If the kernel of the livecd works fine, just build this kernel. The .config file is availiable under /proc/config.gz on the livecd. Emerge the proper kernel sources. The livecd of 20141201 uses a 3.14.14 kernel
* Try to add both the gz-kernel image and in a separate section the uncompressed kernel image to silo.conf . Try both. For me recently the uncompressed kernel image did not work.
* If you can reproduce the kernel from the livecd you can step by step remove unused drivers from the kernel configuration to get a smaller kernel.
* Then - if you really want a 4.X kernel - you can do a kernel upgrade (e.g. use `make oldconfig')
Then this kernel should boot fine.