vista dies upon bootup but safemode ok

(cry) Vista is refusing to boot up. I choose Microsoft Windows from the boot manager and it loads up, displaying the minimalistic splash. After a while the screen goes black. absolutley nothing. During setup when it was in the last stage the screen went black displaying a flashing _. It rebooted after a while and then I got the problem. Upon exiting safe mode my PC refused to even display the video bios with the hdd and keyboard flashing like mad (probably overheat).
In safe mode after rummaging through the Windows drive I found mmc and loaded up the system log. (why has the run option vanished?). It was reporting errors in the ACPI service, the DCOM service and the ATAPI driver (causing errors on my single ribbon). This is my first windows vista build. Installed from DVD with no errors (apart from that _ thing).
Please help me! (cry)
It is not an issue with the disk as it worked fine in VirtualPC (though the burn may have went wrong somewhere. My disk has a warning about 2.4x burners though it worked fine (didnt burn at 2.4x anyway, 2x here). There were no errors during setup.