Ok hi people.

i got a serious problem which ive tried to fix for about 3 days now... first of all ill tell you what im running...just incase any of you see a problem with it.
Running:
Intel Core 2 duo E8400 @ 3.0 Ghz
4G (2x2) ddr2 800
1G Nvidia 9600gt Turbo Force edition...by Gigabyte..customised i think
650W power supply.
and 120G IDE hard drive.
gigabyte motherboard...forgot its name.

So, ive formatted the hard-drive to NTFS
and then installed Vista loaded everything fine blah blah..
then after the 1st few restarts, after loading the gigabyte welcome screen..it jumps through some Grub loader thing.
then it continues to the Loading bar screen.... after about 4 scrolls from left to right.. screen goes blank...hard-drive light is still flashing comp is working, nothing overheated as far as i can tell...yet the screen stays dead and keeps staying dead until i restart...go into safe mode...shut down then start up normally.
I dont think the problem is with the graphics card as i thought at first because after i installed vista i ran a few games (mainly crysis and call of duty 4) and it went fine.
Would it be the IDE hard drive?? as the motherboard only takes 1 IDE slot and 6 SATA. pleaaaase help its driving me nuts.
p.s. ive installed all the recent drivers for eveything....

Is the 6-pin PCI-E connector hooked up to PSU?

How many monitors are connected to the pc? If one, try the other DVI output.

In bios, there's a setting for booting either PCI-E/PCI gpu 1st. Choose PCI-E. It may not matter.

Once you get into Vista, download the latest driver & set up your monitor in nvidia control panel. If your monitor/gpu profile is screwed up, it can blank your screen. Uninstall the driver if it's the latest, restart pc, reinstall it.

Have you got a CD in the drive? Grub is Linux's boot loader... sometimes used on bootable CDs/DVDs.

Well before i had Vista and NTFS formated and loaded on...i had linux...but i totaly wiped it away. And now ive gone and bought a new hard drive SATA to see if the problem is still there. And to Akhilles theres only 1 monitor and in the bios its set to PCI-E. Thanks for help

still not working though =) hopefully this new hard-drive will fix that...or ill have to get a new graphics card maybe. Considering Vista automaticly uses dx10 and my graphic card was only made for dx9...so that could be the problem..or maybe graphic card drivers...because although its an nvidia card. The drivers are from gigabyte... ive tried both but meh.. no luck yet =S

As pointed out - the Grub loader is from your Linix installation. If it's showing up in your boot routine, then it wasn't cleaned off.

How to do a Startup repair:
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] epair.html

See does that help.

No no no, DX10 is backward compatible, BUT you can't use DX10 features on a DX9 card. Vista works even on integrated video.