during installation you get a question about your hd
how to divide it,standart is 1 big partition but the
3th option is to do it manualy...i think its step 5 or
6 in the installation
when you do it manually then you can size and set the
proper format..you need 4 partitions: root, swap
(4gb),home for linux and a fat32 to exchange data with
mswin(r/w)