hi,

at the moment in on the live demo ubuntu 7.10 cd and it seems to be working but when it gets to the install bit it comes up with this message

the ext3 file system creation in partition 1# of SCSI (0,0,0) (sda) failed

so i decided to go out of Ubuntu and totally format it and boot back up but it seems it only works with out freezing and taking hours to do one simple thing it should take a few seconds to do if i have part of a Linux operating system on my hard drive so i don't know what to do any help would be great because i really don't know what i should do as i canrt format

1) Check the Ubuntu disc if it's all right (the boot-up menu should provide an option for this, or the other way is to calculate & check the checksums provided by ubuntu.com)
2) check the harddisk for defects
3) use some live-cd, maybe Knoppix, and have dd, mkfs and/or (c)fdisk do the formatting/partitioning the way you want to do it; if any problems come up, you might want to do a double-check for the harddisk's defects