Alright, I've already had someone install me before and they told me they did the EXACT same thing I tried to do to get it to work...

Could someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong:
I uploaded all the files in the PHPbb zip to the server
Made a new MySQL database called nccoppell_phpbb, put a password on it.
Went to homepage on the site, installation page came up
Typed in all my info, MySQL version 3.x etc
Typed in nccoppell_phpbb as the MySQL database
Typed in nccoppell as the username (pretty sure that's what it's supposed to be; lovely how they don't let you specify a username)
Typed in my password (checked it a billion times)
Left the thing about prefixing tables or whatever to default.

Got:
phbb: Critical Error: could not connect to MySQL database.

The site is http://nccoppell.allhyper.com if it helps any. It's cheap web hosting but I've had one set up through the same host before so I know it can work.

Thanks.

i would say its ur username, u prolly havnt assigned a user to that database. If ur using a web host with cpanel u can go to mysql databases. create a user. then assign that user u made to the database.
the user usually begins with the username of your cpanel account and then something else

yeah, pr0jekt is probably correct on this one. You can check your database username by going into PHPMyAdmin and looking at the top of the pages (should have the user named "logged in @" server name etc etc) so take it from there. Also, have you ensure you are connecting to the database via the correct host. Usually it is simply "localhost" but sometimes host's put their database server somewhere else, and so a static IP is generally supplied.

Check all them, it's nothing to do with PHPBB though.

Tried it, same error...
Screenshots of all the steps I have taken:
http://nccoppell.allhyper.com/pics.html

Thanks.

--EDIT--
I also tried changing the database name to allhyper.com instead of localhost so that's not the problem

--EDIT 2--
Finally got it. Turns out I must be stupid because I didn't look at the PHPMyAdmin thing that said it was MySQL 4.something.something so just had to change that.