I would suggest setting up the disk(s) before letting any distro get it's mits into partitioning. What is your current setup, in terms of what disks you have and what are on the disks.
Also, have you completed burn-in testing? If not, it would be advisable to do so no matter what OS you wish to use. I suggest a few hours of Memtest 86(+) and a few hours of a prime-cruncher (mprime, prime95, etc.) or a test suite (like lucifer). All of these tools and more can be found on the
ultimate boot cd
If you have nothing on the disk currently, Iwould say something is wrong here and you need to jump into troubleshoot mode (try the reinstall in text-only mode to try tonarrow down the issue).
If you have Windows already installed and wish to install linux on the same disk, I would suggest the following actions:
1) Boot into Windows, do a disk error check and a defrag to prep the NTFS filesystem for resizing.
2) Boot a livecd with a
parted tool. I suggest the
GParted LiveCD. Use the tool to shrink the NTFS partition. You may either carve out partitions here or leave it to the installation. I suggest letting the installation try first and if that doesn't work come back and do it manually here.
2.5) [
optional] Create a FAT32 partition between the Windows partition and the space to beused for the linux paritions. This will allow for moving data back and forth between the two OS's as Windows cannot see Linux paritions and Linux cannot (safely) write to NTFS partitions.
3) Install your distro of choice