the last week a friend of mine and i bought two AMD64 6000+ based computers, 4 gb ram, motherboard asrock n61p-s with onboard nvidia geForce 6. my one has a 250 Gb HDD , my friend's one is 500 in size. we both installed kubuntu 8.04. the installation went flawlessly for me, while he reported wrong screen geometry and unreadable fonts at install time, general difficulty using the gui plus the disk was seen as two partitions of 128 Gb each, and because of the absence of disk labels he also got into a mistake accidentally formatting an external 750-Gb USB drive (since the disk reading was all messed up he assumed it was all wrong, so he forgot that drive was actually connected via hub and powered up). no boot disk errors. no memory corruption. the system then installed and ran win XP alright. as soon as i know the HDD brand and model I'm going to tell. he later was able to retrieve his data with some disaster rescue software
that cat ain't no friggin' rookie, he is an experienced and aged programmer but he still didnt manage to get the system installed and had to revert to vanilla Ubuntu, and the thing that puzzles me is that we ran the same software on practically identical machines with dramatically different results. he did some mistake because of tiredness i assume but this does not explain the corrupted istallation screens.
This report seems to be dealing with two separate issues, the video and the mis-reported hard drive size and partitioning.