8.10 installation problems

[AJS302]

i own a dell vostro 200 mini tower, with vista business installed, it has an 80gb harddrive, 2gb ram and an intel dual core processor. recently i have been trying to install ubuntu 8.10 the cd burnt ok and it booted into the live disk fine but when i tried to install it, it went through the first few steps fine but then got stuck on the partitioning set up, i selected the keyboard layout and clicked forward it came up with a small dialogue box saying 'setting up partitioner' after that box closed it came up with the busy cursor and got stuck on the keyboard set up screen. i'm not sure what i did wrong, if anything.
any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Peter09]

Check that your hard drive has enough free space, vista has been properly shutdown, and the drive defraged. It may be that it is not possible to allocate enough room on the drive.