[gutsy beta] installer hangs when formatting partitions

FWIW:
I have installed Kubuntu on this machine (typing from the fresh install) with the ALTERNATE installer. I told the installer to format the partitions.
The machine has an ASUS A8V mobo (see lspci abvove). It has an old IDE drive in it and a big, fast SAMSUNG SATA drive.
The (alternate) installer did not set up grub properly. The machine boots from the SATA drive as set up in the BIOS and as it are my preferences. But for Kubuntu's installer/grub the IDE-drive hda comes first. Grub is written into hda and thus never called - even if it would called, the device names hd0 and hd1 are switched. I had to manually boot via grub and edit menu.lst and tell grub-install to write to /dev/sda

Could this specific BIOS-Setup (and mix of IDE and SATA) cause this bug?
Debian installs fine on this machine, even with hd-encryption.
Windows-install is impossible without opening the case, detaching the IDE-cables and booting it via grub afterwards.

I was installing Gutsy on Dell GX150 (256MB RAM, harddisk is labeled /dev/sda). I was installing on /dev/sda2 , where was already Ubuntu 7.04. The installation halted also at 5% when formatting ext3. I manually partitioned the disk. When I tried for the second time, I let the installer to automatically partition the disk (use largest continuous space) and it let sda2 (ext3) and sda3 (swap) untouched and created sda4 (ext3) and sda5 (swap). For this time it suprisingly worked.

I have seen this on the gutsy betas for some time. I thought it was a partition issue, but running the installer in debug mode I see that if you wait a few minutes a log message appears that complains about the network card firmware. I have recently reinstalled without the error by copying the correct firmware to /lib/firmware before doing the install.

It just looks like it is hanging on the formatting, it is in fact on the next step when it hangs. This never seems to time out, as I have left the installer for 20 minutes and nothing proceeds past the 5% progress - formatting of the last partition specified.

Dell 1501 laptop needing bcm43xx firmware for the wireless card.

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