Installation issues (particularly with HDD)

I'm trying to install Ubuntu 8.04 on a computer I picked up a couple days ago. It's a reasonably new ASUS motherboard (A8NE-FM/S), 2GB of ram. Now, I've run into sooo many issues that I'm really starting to lose patience. I can get through the installation up until step 4of7, the disk partitioning. When I get there, nothing shows up in the window, and none of the options on the bottom of the dialogs are available, except for cancel, back, and forward. Cancel and back both hold no use, and I can't continue forward without creating disk partitions, but I can't create disk partitions without the buttons! I'm starting to be seriously frustrated, but I'm not quite ready to give up yet.

I had an old copy of windows server edition 2003 lying around, so to make sure that I hadn't had a 2nd HDD fail on me, I tried installing windows. It worked fine, notably the partitioning. For whatever reason, Ubuntu can't partition the same hard drive that windows can.

Help please!