I had the same symptom: empty list in "Prepare partitions" page.
The reason in my case was that the disk was used, several years ago in a server 
with RAID configuration. Disks were updated to the server and old once were 
reused in old laptops. Everything worked fine until I needed to reinstall the 
laptop with Ubuntu 9.10. I do not know for sure, but I'll assume that the 
Ubuntu installer does not show "raw" disks which belongs to RAID configuration, 
but instead tries to show the RAID device. As in my case the "raw" disk was 
detected to be part of RAID, but there was no RAID configuration in the laptop 
the installer ended up to show empty list in "Prepare partitions" page.

So I would like to advice you to start Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD, start terminal and 
give command:
devkit-disks --dump
In case you see line
usage: raid
in your hard disk devices information lines, although the device is not part of 
RAID configuration, it may be that Ubuntu 9.10 detects some old RAID 
configurations from the disk. In my case I was able to remove this RAID 
configuration information from the disk by zeroing the last blocks of the disk. 
Be warned, this destroys data from the disk, thus use this only in case you 
want to reinstall to whole disk. (If you want to keep some old installations or 
partitions, this is not the way to do it!)
I wrote down the size of sda from the output of
cat /proc/partitions
Then I zeroed the end of the disk:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 skip=<the size of sda - 10> count=10

I would advice to include output of "devkit-disks --dump" to all
problems related to "empty list in Prepare partitions page" symptom as
it makes problem solving much easier.

-- 
Live install step "Prepare partitions" hangs on 9.10-beta 64bits
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/448316
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