I have a 60Gb drive in a Dell Latitude D600. It all started with trying to install 10.10 as a dual boot. First installation failed at the partitioning stage, next I tried manual partition that also failed. I finally went to Gparted LiveCD to see what I could do.
It allows me to shrink the NTFS, create a swap partition, create a partition in the remaining space. If however I try to format the empty partition as ext3 or ext4 it fails, the drive disappears from Gparted and I have to reboot. When I come back in, the blank space is there with no file system.
If I try to format the new partition in NTFS or Fat32 (as a test) it works fine and Windows can see it.
I even tried creating a FAT32 partition, doing and Ubuntu install to that disk, allocating almost all of it to Ubuntu (thinking I could use the small remainder as a shared disk), it started the install but failed after several minutes of copying with a warning about can not fsync (something) and something about RW problems.
(clarification because based on comments I thoroughly confused the issue, I didn't actually try to install to the FAT32, I just thought that it was odd that Gparted was successful in creating it, so kept the FAT32 which I thought was ok then let the installer shrink it and do whatever it wanted which was of course creating a ext4 beside the shrunken partition. This was an academic exercise since nothing was working anyway and thank all for pointing out my mistaken wording)
At this point I can't install Ubuntu because there seems to be now way to create a suitable partition.
Best Answer
This sounds like you have a physically defective drive, or a defective live cd. The installer uses libparted to do it's formatting/partitioning work, so if that has a corruption then it could cause the disk to fail to partition in both gparted and the installer.
We will need more logs to see more of what's going on. Please report gparted errors and if possible, run from the command line.
On installing on FAT32, the problem is that Linux requires a modern file system with linking, per file permissions, etc. Windows file systems like FAT and NTFS never had these features and so it's not possible to install Ubuntu on them. Other file systems like btfs, ext2, xfs etc however are possible to use.