I come to seek your divine help, I recently installed Debian stable on a seperate hard drive. My problem is that GRUB does not allow me to even choose between the things I want to boot, it simply appears for 0.1 seconds and forwards me to the windows boot loader.
Reinstalling it did not help, using a ext3 reader I found out that the timeout in /boot/grub/menu.lst is set to 5 [which is default and clearly a lot more than what I get] due to my linux noobness I do not know any other problem sources and google has not been of any help to me. Eternal gratitude in return for help.

did you change the "timeout" to some higher value like 45 or 50 ??

Yes, even to 1000 it's still the same. I also tried another thing I googled, holding ESC during the boot - did not help eihter.

I believe its 'e' you hold on boot to get the screen to hold. Pressing the down arrow works or me too. You only have windows and debian on the system?

Tried arrows before, tried 'e' now, does not work.
It's Debian on hd3 with particions main[Z] and swap[X].
Windows XP on hd2[E]
Windows XP on hd1[D]
Windows recovery console on hd0[C]

Problem solved
It was the boot order, if someone else encounters the same problem just change the boot order in your BIOS, the hard drive with GRUB on it has to be loaded first.