GRUB doesn't come up in new installation

I'm trying to install Debian on a fairly new machine, a Celeron 2GHz,
ASUS P4S800 mainboard with SiS 648FX chipset, onboard NVidia Geforce
video card, Award BIOS. It worked fine with the proprietary OS it had
when I bought it.

I just ran the Debian stable business card iso install disc, and
re-partitioned and formatted the hard drive. But when I reboot
without a CD in the drive, when GRUB should come up I get a black
screen instead. Knoppix and Ubuntu Live CDs work fine, which is where
I'm writing this email from. I've also tried using the Debian install
disc as a rescue disc, ie:

linux root=/dev/hda1

but I get a "VFS: Cannot open root device" kernel panic. Perhaps I'm
just not using the rescue disc properly, I've gotten this error before
when compiling a kernel without the --initrd option.

I noticed that the BIOS had boot virus protection enabled, so I
disabled this, without avail. Perhaps the BIOS is still resetting my
MBR even though this "virus protection" is now disabled, and I have to
do a hard reset of the bios? I'm attaching the file produced by the
command

dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot/boot.MBR bs=512 count=1

in case anyone knows how to read an MBR backup. Any ideas?

Attachment: boot.MBR
Description: Binary data

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