Screen blank after install

I took off the quiet and slpash options on the boot command line and the last three lines of information displayed are:

Staring Kernel log
Starting Gnome Display
Starting common Unix print system

The system reboots after these sre displayed and it never comes back, it stays dark, no cursor, nothing. Although you see the screen itself reset, then nothing....You do hear the dvd spinning....

I also tried taking off only the quiet option on the boot command line, at the very end after it says kernel starting a broken blue line comes across the the middle of screen then same as above.

The system has never had another OS installed and is running with a Intel 975XBX2 ATX mother board,
Intel Core 2 duo E6600 Conroe 2.4 GHz LGA 775 Processor,
ATI 100-505156 FireGL V5200 256 MB GDDR PCI Express Video Card,
Samsung Spinpoint 500GB HD 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 Gb/s
8 GB DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 Dual Channel

The Unbuntu disk 6.06(?) came with the the Ubuntu Linux Bible and is a Desktop Live CD-ROM....

I have run the memory check and verified the checksum on the CD-ROM both check out.

Any clues on what to try?