Hi there!
Exactly the same story over here. I (a newby to Linux as well) installed Fedora on a second harddrive (hdb) in my Gateway PC, having XP on the first (hda). Installation process indicated the creation of a boot partition on hda, but when I boot my machine, XP comes up and no sign of GRUB whatsoever.
Only difference is I choose XP to be the default OS, but I guess that shouldn't matter. I also didn't defrag my XP drive before installing Fedora.
Thanks for any help!