Hello Creative,

Forget about using fips to create your partitions, because its only work in FAT and DOS type partition and WindowsXP uses NTFS system.

Now, I think you really have a media problem. Then I suggest you to install Mandrake Linux, because it's very friendly to install, and comes with DiskDrake, a very usefull disk partitioner. Mandrake it's RH based but it's easier to install. The DiskDrake shows all the partitions of your system and allows yous to remove/resize all the partitions. You only need to partitionate your disk in the installation. Then, you insert the Mandrake disk in your drive and start the installation. When the time of partition comes, you see all the partitions and its type, in your case, NTFS (WindowsXP). Then you resize (reduce) the Windows partition and create a new partition in the new space allocated. Don't forget to create 2 partitions, one for the SWAP and another to "/". The SWAP must have some Megabytes, 256 at maximum. You create the SWAP first and the rest of the space free you fill with the "/" partition.

There is a very helpful DiskDrake HowTo

http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/install/ipartit.html

Any problems, here we are!!!
See ya!

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2. What FIPS does

FIPS reduces the size of a partition by changing some values in the partition table and boot sector. It does not change the formatting of the partition, especially not the cluster size and the size of the file allocation table (FAT). Therefore the reduced partition will have a FAT that is in part unused, but this is not a problem for DOS.