8.1 Install - Partitioning problems

Hello, everyone.

If you've been following along this morning you'll know I'm trying to
get an old AlphaServer 1000 running with SuSE 8.1.  With a little help I
have managed to get it to boot up from the CD, and connect to the FTP
server.  It has got to the point where I am sorting out the installation
settings.  Everything looks good, but when I proceed past this point, it
seems unable to format the partitions.

I have set the partitions up thus:

/boot - 100MB (I know it doesn't NEED to be this big)
swap - 384MB (RAM is 192MB)
/ - everything else, approx. 11GB

If I move over to a second console prompt and launch fdisk, it shows
the partitions are there.  Does anyone know why I can't format them ?  I
am trying to use ext2 for /boot and ext3 for / since reiser is not an
option in the list of fs types.

Thanks,
Stuart.