Install freezes whilst trying to edit partitions.

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Hi All,
I am new to Linux and Ubuntu but I have decided to make the step into trying it out. First things first, I am not hugely experienced with computers, having only toyed around with my PC but not trying anything adventurous, however I am quite competent at following instructions. I have backed up all my files and have a Windows install cd so I have been working with a computer which can have all its data erased, luckily. My problem is this:

When I tried to install 8.10 alongside my Windows installation I followed all the instructions for this procedure in the manual yet as the partitions were being edited the installer froze (for about 5 hours) at the 5% mark "Editing Partitions.

I have made several attempts (centring around two ideas) to install to avoid this problem occuring, the methods were:
Formatting the whole drive with the Windows installer, not installing Windows and then running the 8.10 installer.
Running the 8.10 LiveCD demo and running the partition editor.

Lastly I have run the CD integrity test and it is fine. Now I am back to Windows and probably won't make another attempt unless I can get help from here.

Thankyou.

[Linteg]

This doesn't answer your original question on why the partitioning fails, but if you still want to try out Ubuntu you might want to take a look at wubi (http://wubi-installer.org/).

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I saw mention of that but didn't like the sound of it. I would really like to have 8.10 in its own partition so that I can muck around with it and still have something to fall back on.

One other possibilty I thought of during the day was to use a different partition editor (perhaps from a different ditro of Linux) to prep my HDD, however I couldn't find one (besides the one packaged with Ubuntu) which I could put on a boot disk or run from Windows.
If anybody knows of one it would be much appreciated.

[Linteg]

Maybe you could try either GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php) (Live CD / Bootable USB stick) or Parted Magic (http://downloads.partedmagic.com/) (Live CD).