Detecting disk drives from an installation script

[Dallas Clement <dallas.a.clement@gmail.com>]

Can anyone please recommend the best way to programatically obtain disk
drive information, partition, and format from an install script?

I presume I could parse the output of "fdisk -l" to get the drive info.
Seems like there has got to be a better or less error prone method for
doing this sort of stuff.  Also, fdisk is interactive.  I'd like to
emulate something like the Debian installer that lists the various
drives and partitions, allows the user to setup partitions and format,
as well as select the partition to install Linux to.

Any recommendations will be greatly appreciated!

Regards,

Dallas Clement