He thought this was because there was another OS in the drive and didn't know how to proceed (the "Forward" button was grayed out). I took a look at it, suspected no hard drive detected and that was it, the newly install HD had no power attached to it.
I just wished (for the newbies' sake) that instead/besides the disk space requirement with an X there was a note saying that no HD was detected.
The second issue is that even if I chose "yes, install proprietary stuff" the WiFi card wasn't working because of missing firmware (at least the message was right there when clicking on the network icon -strange up/down arrows btw-).
It took me only a few minutes to figure out and find the firmware update submenu and solve the issue but they could have linked that in the wifi connection message; my friend (someone with no experience outside Windows) would have not solved this issue by himself.