I'm trying to install FC3 as a dual boot with a previously installed WinXP system. When I get to the part about partitioning the hard drives, it won't automatically create them. It doesn't seem to see the unallocated 30Gb I have set aside for linux.

I have two physical drives in the system: a 30 gig drive (hda1) which has my XP system, and a second 60 gig drive with one 30 gig ntfs formatted primary partition (hdb1) I'm using as a data drive and 30 gig unallocated.

It will let me get in and manually partition, but I'm fairly new at linux so am not completely sure what to set up. I did have Mandrake 10ce up and running and it had partitioned everything fine, but there seems to be some aspects of the mdk version of kernal 2.6 that conflict with some software (e.g WINE) so figured I'd try Fedora. FC3 wouldn't recognize the previous linux partitions, so I deleted them (in XP) and left the space unallocated. FC3 Still doesn't want to create partitions.

Any suggestions why the auto partition craps out? If I have to set it up manually, what partitions should I create?

Thanks in advance.

For more information, you can read TLDP Partition HOWTO, especially this page:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/partition-4.html

For a start you need at least 2 partitions:
1 to be mounted at /
1 as a swap (allocate around 1GB? Depends on your RAM and your workloads. As a guide, 2 x physical RAM will do, although I'm a bit of memory freak and put 3 x RAM)

Now that will get your computer going. You can have other partition on /home and /usr. /home is the location of all your personal user files, so if you save a lot of video, you might want a huge /home. /usr is for all the programs, so it will depend on the amount of program. My suggestion for now is
partition at / : 7GB (this includes /usr already)
partition for swap : 1.5GB
partition at /home : the rest of the drive

So you got 3 partitions in total. =)