I've followed the following instructions after creating anew partition(FAT 32) on my win XP machine
<<The safest way to install is to add a new hard drive or just create free space on the disk—however, that’s not always an option. If you want to resize your existing partition, select the Manual option. Select the partition you want to resize and click Edit Partition. Then input the new size for the partition in megabytes (leave the other settings alone) and press OK. Next, you’ll need to create a swap partition. Highlight the newly created free space, click New Partition, set the size to 2,000MB, and choose Swap. Click your free space once again, then New Partition, and change the mount point to /. Leave the other settings alone and press Next.>>
I keep getting a message saying""no root file system is defined correct this from the partitioning menu"

What am I doing wrong?
Rob

It appears that you are following instructions for a Linux installation, but you created a FAT32 partition. (Maybe that works, but is not the best choice.)

What are you doing at the top level?---ie are you installing Linux? If so, what distribution? And--are you setting up dual-boot with Windows?