I have exactly the same problem with a new HP ENVY-4. I have tried all the suggested 'cures' above.
- Shrunk Windows using built in Windows "shrink". This freed up 226 GB.
- Ran
sudo gparted with a LIVE boot of Ubuntu 12.04 to partition the free
disk space into extended partition and then partitions for system, swap and /home
- The Ubuntu installer does NOT SEE ANY DISK DRIVE except the USB one it is running from. While 'gparted' sees the drive fine.
The original HP partitioning is (roughly)
4 Gb 'system' partition
400 Gb 'OS' partition
100 Gb 'recovery' partition
?? Gb 'backup' ? partition
My 'best guess' is that for some (unknown?!) reason HP has set up the laptop disk and controller using "FakeRaid" - which makes no sense to me since there isn't a duplicate disk with 500 GB to "mirror" the hard drive to.
I found this community reference for installing Ubuntu to a "fake raid" device but note that it doesn't cover Ubuntu 12.04 AND the instructions seem really complicated AS WELL AS being different for every version of system referred to (as well as hardware setup?):
http://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto
In short I tried digging into this but quickly was over my head and caused my computer to jump into RESTORE mode - which (in an hour or so) returned it to the "store bought" configuration.
I don't understand why the manufacturer created this mess to start with.
I don't understand why, since GParted can understand the hardware, partition it, etc. that (by now !!) the installer hasn't had this capability added to it.
OK, there is a lot I don't understand. Among them is how to follow the community instructions to successfully install Ubuntu 12.04 on my new laptop.
I miss my old Sony, on which comfortably ran Ubuntu for many years. I thought problems like this were behind Linux as the community has grown and large corporations have begun adding support for Linux. I guess I was wrong about this too.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
I was, eventually, able to successfully install Ubuntu on my HP Envy-4, but in the process of getting there (rebuilding Windows 7 several times) I had damaged Win7 RECOVERY partition - so it is not dual-boot with Win7, but it is dual-boot with other Linux distributions.
I documented this (last) process in a .pdf which I put up on Dropbox for access.
Hopefully it will provide some information that will help for others who are dealing with the challenge of installing Ubuntu on the Envy-4 ultrabook.
Best Answer
The U410 comes with both disks in RAID0 configuration.
If you do a Ubuntu only install, you can disable this in the BIOS ( Fn+F2 to enter BIOS, under configuration, RAID option AHCI which is standard S-ATA), the disks now show up as you would expect.