Help with installation at westside meeting

I'm probably not going to make it to the westside meeting tonight. I'm
not feeling too well. One of my English students may be there to get
Linux installed on her Compaq Presario 700 laptop. She wants to
dual-boot with her existing WinXP partition. I would really appreciate
it if someone could help her if she shows up. Her name is Tammy Mendez.
She was at IF2, but whoever was helping her there was unable to get RH
7.3 installed. I tried both RH 7.3 and 7.1 with no luck. 7.3 didn't
recognize her CD-ROM or hard disk, and 7.1 didn't recognize the free
space on the hard disk after I partitioned it with Partition Magic. (Her
XP partition is NTFS, BTW.) If anyone had RH 8 or another distro, maybe
you can get it to work.

Thanks!