Comment 3 for bug 366104

I've experimented with this a bit more, and discovered an unusual behaviour which may help track this down. It turns out my machine has two disks sdb1 and sdba. Looking at the image above, you'll see that though it says "This computer has no operating systems on it", in fact it means this *disk*.

Below the radio button for "Use the entire disk" you'll see it has a drop down (I didn't notice this at first), that allows to select either of the two disks, and furthermore selected initially for sda (not sdb), even though sdb is displayed at the top of the window. If I select sdb on the dropdown, nothing happens, but if I then reselect sda, then the top part of the window switches to showing the partitions for sda, and furthermore identifying it as containing several operating systems. (See second image)

So there seems to be several problems with this dialog box, especially from the viewpoint of a novice trying to install:
 1. It doesn't make it clear that it has found several disks
 2. It confuses "computer" with "disk"
 3. It is not at all clear that selecting from the dropdown of a different control will change the display of the disk it is looking at
 4. The initial display doesn't match the dropdown with the display.

While I have your attention (maybe I should submit this as a separate bug; your call). From the inital display, still not realising it was talking about the second disk, I chose "install side by side" and let it do its thing, assuming it would do the right thing. You can see the result at the bottom part of the second image: it created a *tiny* partition for Ubuntu, 2.5G, so that when I booted to it, and updated all the software, the partition was 100% full, and I couldn't do anything more with it at all. I'm still not sure how to undo the situation, or increase the size of the partition, or remove Ubuntu so I can start again. A bit frustrating.

What it did was