After coming out of the install ubuntu option and being dropped to the livecd desktop, I was able to use gparted to manually create the partitions and then click the install ubuntu icon from the desktop, select the partitions manually created and the installation has continued as expected.
After coming out of the install ubuntu option and being dropped to the livecd desktop, I was able to use gparted to manually create the partitions and then click the install ubuntu icon from the desktop, select the partitions manually created and the installation has continued as expected.