Mounting file system on new partition fails

[Brad Lipovsky <syzme@charter.net>]

Hello, I am sorry to trouble you with my difficulties, however, I feel 
that my ability to self-help has run out.  I am installing Sarge on a 
drive which is half Windows XP and half free space.  Sarge has no 
problems detecting my hard drive or existing partitions.  I select for 
the partition manager to automatically partition the free space 
according to the default settings, "All files in one partition".  After 
the partition is created, I get the following error message:

"The attempt to moutn a file system with type ext3 in IDE2 master 
partition #2 (hdc2) at / failed."

I haven't been able to find any similar experiences documented 
anywhere.  I have tried tweaking the partition options with no success. 

Thank you in advance,
Brad