Thank you Snow!
I read up a little about AHCI... still don't really understand it but when I turned AHCI on in the BIOS I was able to see my hdd in the installer

Now I've installed Win 7 and Kubuntu Karmic and am attempting to triple boot. I'm making some progress using the brilliant EasyBCD to modify the Win7 bootloader. I made many attempts using GRUB2 as the main bootloader but it just broke my Windows install every time.. With EasyBCD I'm now able to boot smoothly into either Win or Linux, but not yet OSX.. hope to get it working soon!