It is a company purchased machine, brand new from HP. If it doesn't work as hardware out of the box, we will return it for one that does.

I am now trying EUFI related options - as in switching everything to do with UEFI off, as well as the built in RAID thingy.

as ive never used the Mint installer, but have used the older Ubuntu installers (pre vs 10) and several pure Debian installers i know at one point in time you were able to ctrl+alt+F# to get out of the GUI and manually partition the drive, then get back into the GUI and continue from there.

that might be an option.

i do know from my LUG (linux user group) that several guys who really like Mint have issues all the time when it comes to installing over or with MS partitions on the drive. dual boot with MS/Mint is very complicated and is more broke then working as of Mint 13/12

If you want to take another stab at this in the future, my suggestion is to burn a gparted live CD, boot into that and use it to wipe your HDD completely clean (needless to say, backup all your needed files first...).

Then I suggest installing Windows 7, and then try installing Linux Mint again.

-D

I did use the live CD and tried manually partitioning the disk. I used other partition managers successfully. I deleted all partitions, add suitable ones. I tried gparted and fdisk. They both worked fine. However, partman would not work at all (and that is the one that ubiquity uses). I also tried gdisk which created a UEFI compatible partition table and that did not work either.

I could not find a way to get ubiquity to bypass its own attempt to partition the disk. It could not continue past the partition table failure.

Ah ok I'm with you now.

Unfortunately this sounds like a bug with Ubiquity/partman, as I'm sure you've guessed. If I were you, I'd submit a bug here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity

I've had a look through the current bugs but unfortunately I couldn't find anything quite the same as your problem, however do have a look yourself.

Beyond this, I would try installing an alternative (non Ubuntu based) popular desktop Linux distribution such as Fedora and seeing if you have better luck there.

Here's the famous tree showing all alternatives:
http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/u...3/gldt1103.png

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I tried filing the bug. I am not sure if the bug actually got filed because of some browser/web-site shenannigans.

I have succeeded in getting Gentoo installed. Quite the throwback! It reminds me of my experiences with Slackware "Ygdrassil" in the .9 days somewhere in the 90s.

At least for Ubuntu (which also could not see the partitions). I ran (in a console)

# dmraid -rE

to erase RAID metadata from the hard drive. The installer could then see the drives partitions just fine.

Now I am also able to install Linux Mint (13). hooray - Gentoo was a bit too much detail for a quick install. Looks great for embedded systems though!

Nice!

Even better!

Glad to hear you got it all working.