Error loading operationg system

I have a machine with a single 80GB IDE C drive attached to the motherboard. There is also a PCI adapter card with two more hard drives. I wanted to install Ubuntu 7.10 on this system and did not care about dual botting or keeping windows. I ran the CD and then ran the install. It was seeing the 80GB C drive as sda and was not defaulting to it. I selected guided and chose the sda drive to use whole drive. It installed fine but then after rebooting I got the "Error loading operating system" message. I tried a few more times to reinstall it. I even clicked on the advanced button and changed the (hd0) to (sda) for the boot loader but that failed. I finally disconnected the two drives connected to the adapter card and re ran the install. This time I was able to boot into Ubuntu without a problem after the restart. I then shutdown and attached the two drives again and started it up. Again it booted up without a problem. I ran all the updates from the web but then noticed the "partitioning" tool was no longer in the System->Administration menu. I don't think it's seeing the new drives. How can I format and mount them? Thanks.