No partitionable media?

[beverage]

Ok, here we go, I don't have the time to waste on downloading 14 CDs =P So I downloaded the netinst CD iso. It's burned, it boots, etc... but here's the problem.

After going through some steps it stops at partition hard drive. It tells me that there is no partitionable media. -_- So I tried using linux26 at the boot screen and that changed nothing. Could it possibly be that I'm using western design hard drives? Or is it seriously not plugged in, does the CD drive need to be hooked up to the hard drive? Please help, I've gone to a lot of trouble to do this, I really want to have a nice dual boot with debian and windows XP. This is really starting to tick me off.

EDIT: does this help a bit:

My partition setup:

Partition 1: NTFS 39.06 GB free space: 34.83 GB (It currently has windows on it)
Then i have 30.18gb of unallocated space

ON my second hard drive I have 298.09 GB of unallocated space.

I dunno if that helped at all, but I want to put both windows and linux on my first hard drive, then have them share my second hard drive (which i will make fat32)

[beverage]

ugh, just... never mind, I downloaded mandriva today in case I still cant get debian to work, I guess I'll use that...