You don't mention which version of Debian you have tried - the current stable release is version 6 code-named 'squeeze'. It's quite old now, and if that's the version you tried, it might be worth trying the wheezy Release Candidate 1 release installer from <http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/>, which will install Debian version 7 (shortly to be officially released but available now in 'testing')