Unable to perform clean Install

[Op]

I wanted to put ubuntu on my parents old machine for them. I used the alternate installer since its a low resource system.
I burned a 10.10 Alternate CD from the latest ISO on the ubuntu site as of 3/12/11.
It booted fine to the CD and when I ran the check disk utility it checked out as a good burn.

Everything went fine until I had to format and partition the drive. It would let me select the drive and set it up for default ext4 with swap. But when I would tell it to apply the partitions it would hit 33% and then say something along the lines of

Partitioner was unable to mount "/" on <drive name>, try again?"

I tried it with both drives and got the same issue.

Hardware involved:
HD0 = ST340015A
HD1 = IBM-DTTA-351290
Processor = Intel Celeron CPU 2.4 GHz
Motherboard = ACPI Uniprocessor PC