Video card driver problem...I think

Howdy folks,
I have been thinking that I wanted to try out linux for quite some time now. Well I finally initiated the first steps of the operation and have run into a problem before even getting a glimpse of the desktop. Haha typical. I donloaded the iso and burned it and started looking at partitioning everything and I have a question about that as well but I'll get to that in a moment. I decided before I went through all the hassle of installing it and partitioning drives I'd check it out on the live cd. So I restart and boot from the cd and it works up to the black loading screen with the little symbol in the middle then my monitor switches to blue and gives me the no signal message. It never returns. I would assume my video card is not supported or something along those lines. Also I am currently running vista x64 and when I go to shrink my partition I notice that if I shrink my partition it doesn't get very small at all. I think this may be because I have all kinds of files on the partition. When I do set this all up I wanna be able to access all of my files from either os. The best option I could think of was to create a new partition and shift everything to it that was important then reload vista Which doesn't sound fun because it is a very messy and buggy oem copy. Anyhow What do you all think are my best options? Or where can I turn for support on such a matter?

**update Someone from another sight mentioned pressing ctrl + alt and f1 and that brought me to a terminal and then told me to punch in sudo dpkg xserver-xorg or something along those lines but it did nothing for me still haven't gotten anywhere. I am @ a total loss and somewhat frustrated. My anti Microsoft tendencies are lessening more and more. If anyone has any ideas id appreciate the help.

System Specs:
I7 920
X58 chipset
9gb Ram 1066 mhz
Visiontek ATI Radeon HD4850