Help! Spectacular blowout of warty on post install boot

[M.Blackmore]

I've been lucky perhaps, but I've never seen an OS installation reboot 
the computer on first touch to the hard disk in some 24 years of 
"microcomputer" use...

I am a linux newbie(ish) as due to pressures of time haven't been able 
to move beyond simply "using" linux despite a pretty good grounding in 
microsoft over the years (from which I determined to escape for 
ideological reasons a few years back when I drew the lot to look after 
the kids and quit work!). So don't assume too much knowledge of linux 
and in particular debian. I've been using Suse pretty much out of the 
box for the last few years and have little detailed understanding beyond 
YAST.

The kit is a Gigabyte motherboard a few years old - Kt7a RAID I think. 
The DVD and CDwriter are on the ide channels hda and hdc, the 80gb disk 
is on the first HPT370 channel as hde. 512mb ram. Works fine for 
mandrake and suse (But as I am trying to move out into debian world... 
like to get ubuntu working).

I've reinstalled twice in case I missed something, once using expert 
mode, the second time letting it go automatically with "defaults" apart 
from pointing it at the appropriate partition for installation (hde10 in 
this case). Boot installed to hard disk by default etc.

On booting after install when prompted the computer instantly reboots 
itself on first touch to the hard disk, or so it seems. It is /very/ 
immediate, and will carry on cycling around like that 'til the 
electricity runs out.

What did I do wrong or what went wrong, and what should I try to put it 
right and get a bootable system?

Yours very frustrated
a hopefully supportive warthog in deepest provincial England
Whoops I gotta go and get the baby up and get his big sister from school 
now, I'm gonna be late!

Malcolm