Installation failing during partitioning

I am trying to install using the following components:

Elitegroup 945P-A motherboard w/ 3.06 Pentium D and 4x512mb RAM
Two Western Digital Caviar SATA hard drives - 250gb on SATA1, 500gb on SATA2
EVGA e-GeForce 7600GTS
Hauppauge WINTV PVR500
Dlink Network adapter
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 4

The regular install will not mount the CDROM drive. I've gone into the BIOS and told it to put the PATA first and it still won't work.

The expert install gets further along - it mounts the CDROM, loads the preseed file, and successfully claims an IP address for my cable modem. Then it fails during partioning. It recognizes my 500gb hard drive by name and model number, and it gets through 100% of creating the first partition. The screen pauses briefly and reports that the creation of partition 1 failed.

I've researched on the Linux forums, and it seems alot of this SATA problem is due to the fact that Pluto is using r0 of Sarge, specifically the installer. Does anyone know when Pluto is planning to upgrade to the newer Debian installer?

Also would it be possible to use another installer to get Debian onto the machine, and then continue with the Pluto installation from that point?

And I have a more general question - is 'half the battle' of building a Linux &/or a Pluto system in choosing the right hardware? It seems that would cause the Pluto Home staff to be not-very-forthcoming with help in that area, since they're going to sell their own hardware soon. I can't believe that I'm the only person who's tried to build a system around an LGA775 processor and SATA hard drives. I posted a topic already, and emailed Pluto; no luck.

Thanks,
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