thanks for the help last time, i am a tool, anyway now that i have the drive partitioned just right, for some reason, ubuntu isn't recognising the partitions, the installation part4/7 keeps showing just: /dev/sda where it used to show the different drives. but when im running the live cd it can still see all my windows files!!
also when i run windows it has no problem seeing the other drives.
What is the story here? anybody?

Maybe you need to format the new partitions. No OS can 'see' an empty partition.

If your Windows partition is in NTFS format, Ubuntu will not see it without installing special driver.

Mounting Windows Partitions (NTFS-3G).

If the issue is seeing the partitions during the installation, I wonder if you are looking in the right place to point the installation to the partition that you set aside. If you pre-partitioned the drive, you need to manually set the partition during the installation that you want to use.

Take a look at this installation guide.

Did you pick the option to manually edit the partition table?

all of the drives are formatted, none in the ntfs format either, i am trying to manually select the partition during the installation but it only seems to give the drive as a whole despite the fact that it is most definitely divided up and even the when running the live cd of ubuntu, i can see the different drives in "my computer"!

You mean that you have one physical drive in the system and created one or more partitions on the drive?

What file system did you use to make the partition for ubuntu?

...and you did not get the options to edit a partition, as demonstrated in the pics on this site?

yeah sorry i had one drive partitioned 4 ways, 2 for windows, one as a swap and the last for ubuntu. i did get an option to edit a partition but it only showed my whole 80 gig drive. as for file system i believe i used fat32? still wasn't getting anywhere this evening so ive just backed up all my data and taken the plunge full speed, forget windows! thanks anyway guys