Hello everyone

I am new to *nix and need some guidence please. I have installed Mandrake 9.1 on a partitioned HDD. The installation went well, I was asked to remove the last install cd and reboot. Lilo came up and recognised the other OS's and I chose to start Mandrake. The boot up sequence went fine everything came back [ok]. However, right before it should go to the login screen my monitor (Sony TFT LCD SDM-M61) goes black. When I cycle the power my monitor briefly shows an error, something like invalid scan range 4.9 or something like that. I can reproduce the error if needed. I have had Mandrake 8.2 succesfuly operating on this setup before. I tried to get another distro (Redhat 9) on here and had the same problem. The buttons on the monitor (menu, contrast, brightness) will not function as well while showing the black screen. Is this a driver issue w/ my monitor? My video card is a Nvidia 3 DDR 128 which it sees, and I don't think it could be that since I can see the boot up sequence. I am new to *nix so I couldn't find the right parameters in google although I tried. Any help is apreciated and I can provide details if needed. Thanks for your time.