Recently I had to rebuild several desktops for redeployment for some summer interns.  I grabbed the manufacturer OS install CD and booted up, hit any key to boot from the CD, started initializing and ... Black Screen.  

Well, I thought it was maybe a video issue since I had a pretty new LCD hooked up to a older desktop.  I pulled an older monitor down from the shelf and tried again.  Same behaviour when starting the WindowsXP install I ended up in a black screen.  I rebooted again and missed the "hit any key" and then I saw GRUB appear.

Grub is a linux bootloader.  So the previous incarnation of this system was apparently a CentOS linux OS.  I pulled out one of my handy boot utility CDs and booted into a prompt and used an FDISK tool to reset the MBR and define a single primary/active NTFS partition.  Rebooted off the XP install CD and all was good.