I so I bit the bullet and changed to AHCP, even though the bios warned of loss of data.
I was then no longer able to start windoz (windoz booted but my system password was no longer viable.)
With the controller set to AHCP I could then see the hard drive from the live iso.
FYI resizing the windoz data partition with gparted fried the NTFS partition.
So now I have lots more disk space for my linux install
Installation went fine.
Thanks
bad_aptitude