I've been tring to install Debian Woody for the last while now, and it works, just not as expected. On the first reboot after initial setup, I get errors about their being no active partition and I'm forced to boot using the CD. I started the installation with no boot arguments. Here's my installation settings. My harddrive, /dev/hda, was set to have 3 partitions. 10 megs for hda1 that is marked bootable in cfdisk. hda2 is a 256 meg partition of type Linux swap, and the rest is put into a third partition, hda3. hda2 is set as my swap partition. hda3 is then initialized and mounted as my root parition. The 10 meg hda1 is initialized as the /boot partition. The kernel and drive modules are then installed from the cd without any problems. Taking a look through the Configure Device Driver menu there didn't seem to be anything I needed, so that step was skipped. Configuring the network was successful. The base system is then installed from the CD without problems. At the menu regarding Lilo setup, I choose to install it in the mbr of hda. Now on first reboot, when the system is checking the harddrive to boot from I get the error.

 Not found any [active partition] in HDD
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

At this point I can boot from the CD into my system using the "rescue root=/dev/hda3" boot parameter, but I'd much rather the system to be able to automatically boot. Anyone had similar problems, or knows how to fix this?

Post your /etc/lilo.conf

Rerun the Lilo install or try the GRUB one. It looks like the mbr has not been written.