[NTLUG:Discuss] Boot weirdness

[Fred]

Just installed opensuse 12.3 into an old P4 server and now when it boots,

my monitor gives me an "Input not supported" error during the text portion
of the boot but displays ok when the X server starts in run level 5. What did
I do wrong? How do I fix it? I have spent the evening searching and trying 
different things but nothing has worked so far. It doesn't help that the grub 
docs (or is it grub2 now?) on the suse 12.3 pages don't describe what is
installed. 

Obviously the resolution during the first part of the boot is wrong and not 
something my monitor can handle but I cannot find the fix.

Fred