I'm trying to install RH 8.0 Personal to a empty partition on a 45GB Maxtor drive. The first partition is 21GB and contains a install of Windows XP and is formatted NTFS. The second partition is unformatted and empty.

I am getting an error message partway through that says:

"The partition table on /dev/sda is inconsitant. Using LBA is recommended."

I then click "Ignore" and a little later get this message:

"The boot partition /book may not meet booting constraints for your architecture."

I have never even got to the point of actually installing the software. Any ideas on what my problems might be?

Try making it a partition in windows.. but not formatting it with a filesystem. Basically, when you make it an extended or primary partition, it will just be labled as "free space" until you apply a logical drive to it. So just don't set a logical drive to id and make sure it is set for "free space"

Then go back and try to install.. should work fine. I had a similar problem with my latest mandrake install on a shared HD. Did that and it worked like a charm.

I tried creating a primary parition and they started the Linux install again. I'm now getting a new error message:

"Could not allocate partition. Partiting failed: Could not allocate parition as primary partitions."

I clicked "OK" and they got this message:

"You have not defined a root partition (/), which is required for installation of Red Hat Linux to continue."

The install again failed. Any more ideas?

does that installation let you use fdisk ?
I remember earlier RH did. if it does , you could print (p) your partition table and show us. If you do get in fdisk be carefull. 3 characters are enough to blow away your windows partition.
#fdisk /dev/sda
fdisk> p
.....
fdisk> q

It allows the use of fdisk so I'll give that a try. My windows install is backed up to a 2nd hard drive just incase.