Red Hat 9 Installation Problem

Hey,
I am trying to install Red Hat 9 along side Windows XP, which is currently installed. I downloaded the 3 ISO files for Red Hat 9, and have burnt them to CDs. I then restarted my computer with the 1st installation CD. It boots up and everything seems to be fine. It gets to the part about partitioning my hard drive. I click Automatic Partition and
Keep all partitions and use existing free space.
Then I click OK.
It then says:
Error Partitioning
Could not allocate requested partitions:

Partitioning failed: Could not allocate partitions as primary partitions.

Then I click OK again, and it gives me another error screen which says.

The following errors occured with your partitioning,
You have not defined a root partition (/),
Which is required for installation of Red Hat Linux to Continue.

This can happen if there is not enough space on your hard drive for the installation.

The last error message is wrong, because I have over 40 gigs free.

Can someone help me.
Also, I have one hard drive. But when I bought my computer, it was already partitioned into 2 drives. The main drive C, has a total of 70.4 GB and 43.1 GB Free. And the minor partition has a total of 4.07 GB in total, and is filled up with recovery information.

How can I set my computer up so I can have both XP and Red Hat, and not lose my information.

Please Help

So your partitions fill up your drive? That means the installer has no space to create new ones. The free space on your C: drive is still on on that partition, and isn't the same as free space on the drive, since it is part of a partition and has filesystem information on it. You can't use that to install Linux on - it needs it's own partitions.

You have to use a program to resize the partitions and kame them smaller. I would suggest Partition Magic since is very user friendly. Also be aware of the fact that you can have only 4 primary partitions on a disc. If your disk have already 3 then you can create only one more and since linux needs three there is a problem with that. What you can do is create logical partitions in one primary partition. To do so you have to resize a partition which is logical and you probably have one. Use partition magic and you will understand what I am talking about.

Linux needs three? That's news to me, I have Red Hat 9.0 alongside Win Xp and it works fine and in windows i have 3 partitions and linux has one?

I'm one of the newbie in unix/linux.

I've met a few problems when installing Red Hat 9. But finally I managed to install it. Check out my experience at http://lifeasprogrammer.blogspot.com/2005/06/redhat-9.html

Hope that helps.