[ubuntu] 10.04 install help?

Used to use Ubuntu way back in Dapper, but haven't since then... I've been trying to dual-boot Ubuntu [Lucid] since yesterday, on a freshly wiped hard drive. I installed Windows 7 first, made sure to leave a good chunk of HDD space for Ubuntu.

Anyway, I've tried both the x64 and x86 ISOs, and they both give the same issue. During boot, I get an 'Installation Failed' message, telling me it's going into Live mode where I can diagnose or try again. If I try to install from Live mode, I can get to the keyboard/locale setup, and then the installation just hangs. I can close the program and still use Live mode, but nothing else happens. I left it for several hours and it still was stuck at that step.

Also tried booting from USB [I didn't actually know my BIOS supported this, but I found the option after a good hard look] and all I get is a message 'Boot error.' and I have to reboot the computer.

Specs:
AMD Athlon64 3400+
3GB RAM
200GB HDD + 320 External
ATI HD Radeon 4670

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

also crossposted to gurnal

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Does Win7 default to setting up a GPT instead on a MBR when writing to a new disk? If it does, maybe the Ubuntu installer is confused by this fact.

You need to get verbose information for the 'Installation Failed' message, otherwise it's very hard to do diagnostics.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I actually tricked it into installing--I heard other people had trouble getting it to recognize USB keyboard/mouse during the install, so I just unplugged it for a couple seconds while it did the hardware scan. It works now.

I've got a different problem now though, but I'm thinking it could just be the video drivers. The OS just runs really slowly, to the point where I can type a sentence and a bunch of letters get skipped over. I'm going to try the proprietary drivers next boot and see what happens.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Concerning 2D acceleration the open xf86-video-radeon driver should support your card perfectly, so I doubt switching to the proprietary fglrx is going to make anything better.

Check the kernel log (either via dmesg or /var/log) and the Xorg log and see if there are any problems with the acceleration. Maybe the DRM module isn't loaded by default, resulting in no KMS and only mediocre hw accel. You can also check this with lsmod, it should at least show 'drm' and 'radeon' loaded, 'radeon' preferrably with modeset enabled.

How ya doing, buddy?