I have just recieved an HP Visualize workstation which has twin pentium 550's running and enough ram to choke a horse i am trying to use it as a server, oh it is also running Linux.; Unfortunatly whenever i boot up it starts loading linux goes through a bunch of text of what it is loading then just goes to a blank screen! Why oh why is it doing this? It just sits there flashing every once and a while.

You may have your X server improperly configured.

At the boot: prompt, type this:

linux 3

then hit enter. You should get to a command prompt in the end.

You fail to mention which flavour and version of linux you are running, but you should not be able to run this command:

Xconfigurator

which will allow you to set up the X windows display.

Try these suggestions and then post back.

unfortunatly i do not even get a prompt. it goes from a loading script to just a blank black screen

This sounds like a wrong screen resolution or refresh rate.

If the system is not halted, you can kill X by pressing ctrl+alt+backspace. Then start Xconfigurator and set up X correctly.

Phantasm didn't mean the Linux shell prompt, but the boot prompt in LILO or GRUB (whichever you happen to use)

Yes Nodsu, that is true. I mean from the Lilo prompt, not from the shell prompt.

You've got a misconfigured X server.... at least, that seems to be so from the way you have described it.