lost in linux

I am trying to get into IT and have found someone who was willing to train me. He gave me a project to do this week, He wanted me to download suse 10.1 and install it on my pc. I went to the site and downloaded an iso file and burned it to a cd and made it bootable. I installed a hard drive sled and purchased a seperate hard drive to install suse 10.1. When I booted up my pc with the new hard drive and bootable cd I recieved alot of activity in text, none of which I understood and got to a point that I just shut down. Now when I try to boot to my old hard drive I hang up at the post for about 4 minutes and then it will hang between the welcome to windows xp and the gui. It does finally boot up but I dont know what I did. Can anyone help?