Suse 9.3 on HP xw9300 workstation: kernel panic!

Hello All, I have successfully installed suse 9.3 on an HP xw9300 workstation....well...sort of. Once the installation is done the system reboots. I choose normal startup (SuSE 9.3 professional) on the GRUB boot loader menu and the system freezes. I reboot again this time in failsafe mode and I immediately get a kernel panic. I'm assuming it is the exact error happening during normal startup just not hidden by the system trying to load the suse splash screen. Has anyone come accross this? It is a dual opteron 250 with 16GB of RAM. I forget what the video card is. I know it is an NVIDIA card worth ~$4000. TIA. --ryan