New installation of ubuntu 12.04.2 server edition will not boot from hard disk

[Andrew]

New installation of ubuntu 12.04.2 (server edition) on Dell Dimension
4300 won't boot from the hard disk - "fd0 read error". Have checked the
hard disk using GParted running ubuntu (10.04 as it happens!) from CD
rom and it looks OK - partitions are: unallocated 1 MiB, /dev/sda1 ext2
243 MiB, /dev/sda2 extended 37.01 GiB, /dev/sda5 lvm2 37.01 GiB. Any
ideas as to how to partition the hard disk to make it bootable again
and/or to reinstall 12.04 so that it works please?

Andy