cant get OS to load on new system

[webbcm01]

i just finished my new computer last night and on my last comp i had xp and 20 gigs partgitioned off to run ubuntu linux. i decided thqt for this rig i would just run linux on it. anyways, i have it all assembled. i setup the bios and the bios is detecting all hardware and everything seems to be working fine. I put in the install disk for linux installed and it told me to reboot from the hard drive. i have tried all that i can think of but everytime i reboot just from the hdd, not a cd or floppy, it tells me to insert a bootable disk as if its not finding anything to boot off of the hdd. i installed the os using 3 different cds set it to boot straight off the hdd and still i just dont know what it might be. any advice? (the system below is what im working on)

[ktkendall]

First thing is to check the boot options and order in the BIOS, just to rule out the obvious, if it's not that, then you'll have to boot from Linux disk again and fix it that way. I do not know enough about Linux installations though to tell you if you can fix the boot sector with Linux disk or if you'll have to reinstall.

[webbcm01]

i had originally set my 2 250 hdd's in raid 0, and i dont know why but once i reset the nvidia raid controller, it worked fine makes no sense to me but whatever thanks

[Parangles]

My total of one weeks experience with Linux ubuntu is that Linux is very sensitive to
the condition of the hard drive. It has to be clean. I had to remove all old partitions completely
and zero fill with Dban and then let the Linux install do its default partitioning.