after i insalled the Mac osx86 10.4.4 Install DVD i restart and i get a black screen with a cursor. what am i doing wrong?

Perhaps your MacOS-partition hasn't been given the boot-flag. Somehow the installation seems to miss this in the partitioning-phase, at least it did for me. So what you probably need to do is to boot up with a windows 98 cdrom or some livecd that gives you access to fdisk. In fdisk, select your MacOS-partition as bootable and that should hopefully fix your problem.

Or, you partitioned your drive using a newer and EFI aware Disk Utility. If that is the case, you should try other methods of setting up your partitions like using Window's diskpart program.

I have the same problem when I install 10.4.6 on a clean Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (that is if my memory serves me correctly), partition on my 2nd hard drive.

I can boot from the 10.4.6 DVD and start the install, but once it's finished and reboots. BAM. Blank screen, blinking cursor.

Check a few posts down.

For me, I fixed the problem by installing Darwin 8.01 (google for the ISO). Then during the OS X install, just have it do an erase of the partition (not all free space, just the partition).

During the Darwin install make sure you choose HFS+, though.