Partitioning a HD

[UNGER, JOHN WM]

I went to load Ubuntu 8.04.3 today for my daughter-in-law. First tried to establish a partition for Windows as well, got a "no room" error and decided to just make one partition & put Ubuntu on it, could repartition later if she wanted. She came in & said she wanted the two partitions, so I tried to back up on the install and repartition. Now the boot disk doesn't find the HD at all - I cannot establish a partition in it.

I've tried rebooting, coming at it from different paths, etc to no avail. Once - in the series of reboots - it gave me the entire disk and then when I went to partition it lost it all again. 

Weird. Any hints ideas?