Installing ubuntu 9.10 -- some problems

[Paul King]

The download of the ISO went OK, the binary was burned to DVD, and it checked 
out. I booted into it and noticed:

1. graphical interface doesn't work (kernel panics and it can't find my main 
hard drive)
2. text mode works well, except for when the time comes to select my packages. 
it seems to dump core (gives a symbolic stack dump on screen for a split 
second), then put me into a screen where it says that the "selecting packages" 
step failed. A look at the console (tty4) says that "pkgsel failed (code 127)". 
After this, I checked the DVD, no problems.

Another bit of strangeness is that in text mode, the system was going to 
install to my USB/Firewire drive by default (which is a single NTFS partition), 
instead of the Linux partitions of my main SATA drive, inside my PC, which one 
would think would have been the default. The firewire drive doesn't show up in 
the BIOS, whereas the internal drive does.

Because package selection died on me, I had to only set up the users and 
passwords and GRUB on partitions containing only the base system (no X, nothing 
else), so that I could at least boot into Windows to write this email.

Anyone have any clues about this?

Paul

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