I've never had a card that needed to be recognized before installing, but I've always had nVidia chips. You can install those without a card installed.
It's loading the standard VGA adapters at least. Right click My Computer, choose Manage, then open the Device Manager from the tree on the left. There should be one item with a yellow exclamation sign. It should either be the name of the card or "Video output device" (or something like that...heh). Can always try right-clicking it, choosing "Update Driver,' then pointing to the CD. If that works, I'd try setup again from the beginning.