Hi all!

I want to install ubuntu on my laptop, but I'm running into some issues.

The laptop came with Windows 7 pre-installed and I wish to keep it because some software needed for my study only runs on Windows (as well as some games ).

Using a Windows I shrunk one of my partitions and made a new one in the remaining space (done with Windows 7's standard partition program, not a third party program). I needed to format the new partition, therefore it's filesystem is NTFS. (Besides this new partition I have two other NTFS partitions containing the Windows installation and some of my files, respectively).

Windows recognized the new partition so I thought I was ready to go. I popped in my Ubuntu live-cd (on an usb, if that's important), started the installation. But when the screen to select the install-partition came up, it showed the wrong partitions. To be more precise, it showed the correct number of partitions, but they all had wrong sizes! Also, the installation was not able to tell me how much space was already used in each partition, which seemed odd to me.

I'm not going to install ubuntu yet, because I am afraid my data will be overwritten (though I have backups, it's just such a hassle to re-install Windows).

Does anyone have an idea what can be done about this?

I have already looked around on the internet and found the following thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=886985&page=2

The issue seems very similar to mine. It states that adding "all_generic_ide" to the end of the bootline has fixed the issue for some people. Being new to Linux (you might have noticed other posts by me about Linux, that was me helping my dad ) I have no idea where this "bootline" is situated... Searching around on the internet returned some info, but it all only seems relevant for versions of Ubuntu which have already been installed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

PS:
GParted is able to show some partitions. The partitioncount seems correct, but the sizes are all off! I'm sure I don't have a 992.50 kB partition. It displays a symbol and clicking on that gives the info that GParted needs additional packages for NTFS support. Perhaps this is why the sizes are wrongly recognized?
How could I even add a package to a live cd?

PS2:
I am able to browse my Windows partitions using the Ubuntu live cd. It shows all files correctly. Odd...