Difference between installation restart vs desktop restart

[Jim Byrnes]

I am trying to install Ubuntu 16.04.1 to a machine I just built. It has 
an Intel Xeon E3-1220v5 LGA1151 processor, 32 GB ddr4 dram and a Geforce 
GTX 750Ti video card.

The first thing I did was to just "Try Ubuntu". The screen flashed dark 
pink then went black.  The harddrive led flashed for a while but in the 
end the screen remained black.

Then I tried to "install Ubuntu". This seemed to work. The install 
screen was at a nice resolution. I checked the "download software while 
installing option" and the "third party software option". When prompted 
I restarted the machine.  Again I got the pink flash and then the black 
screen.

Some googling led to the suggestion not to allow third party software, 
so I tried that and I also did not check "download software while 
installing" and it seemed to work. After the restart I was booted to the 
ubuntu desktop. At this point I ran the software updater and restarted 
at the prompt.  At this point I again ended up at a black screen.

I then repeated the above procedure but did not run software updated 
once the desktop came up.  When I restarted I again ended up with just a 
black screen.

So what is the difference between a installation restart and a normal 
desktop restart?

Most of the suggestions I see from google pertain to dual boot 
situations which is not the case here. They talk of grub options and 
ctrl-alt-F1 to tty. I don't see a grub menu, but could edit grub.cfg if 
that would help.  I tried ctrl-alt-F1 but that does not bring up a tty.

Thanks,  Jim