I had this problem with black screen and game refusing to load and spent about 8 hours frigging with it. Infogrammes were no help at all - they said it was a safedisc problem and to wait an unknown amount of time for a patch !
IT IS NOT SAFEDISC related. It is video related.
1) The safedisc check completes and the Safedisc logo goes away.
2) Then a black box goes to top left with approx 80% of screen blacked out. Then res changes and screen blacks out 100% then res changes back and game exits to normal correct resolution desktop.
3) "Nocd" decrypt patch fails exactly the same way.
THE FIX for me was uninstall again (for like the 10th time !!!)
Then FULL install (not Minimal without videos) and now it loads every time.
Then like everybody else I spent 2 hours setting up the options with yet more black screens and restart failures (fixed by restoring f1gstate.bak over f1gstat.sav) Then there was the lockups needing power off/on and menus flashing and scrolling after calibrating Guillemot Ferrari Wheel (fixed by going into menu options and exiting again)
PIII 1.0GHz Abit SA6-R MSI GEForce3 512MB SBLive5.1 Win98SE/XPPRO dual boot Mirrored IBM UDMA100 disks
PIII 1.0GHz Abit SA6-R MSI GEForce3 512MB SBLive5.1 Win98SE/XPPRO dual boot Mirrored IBM 7200rpm UDMA100 disks Guillemot Ferrari FF Wheel