I'm trying to install suse 9.1 personal.
It will almost completely go through the setup.. but right after release notes it goes into hardware detection (I can't remember what the exact verbaige is). When it gets to this point my monitor goes black. Obviously it's testing the hardware.. but it never comes back. I have a 15" flat panel LCD. I am using an Nvidia grafx card.
I've installed Debain, and linare on this same setup before, and never seen this problem.

I can reboot the machine and suse will load, and continue to the desktop.
But then once the found new hardware boxes start appearing... black screen.

What can I do?

Try to boot into console (type 3 on the grub menu) and login as root,
start Yast and run a 'Online Update', then select 'Download Nvidia Driver'. This will hopefully solve your problem. Type init 5 to get into graphical mode.

Maybe it is already sufficient to run sax2 and do a proper configuration.