Problems with Time Machine and Bootcamp, help!

ugh. ok so here's the deal:

I just installed Leopard and everything seemed fine. I plugged in a new 500GB external hard drive and partitioned it into 2. the 350 GB was for backup (time machine) and the other 150 was for storage (movies, music, whatever)

so time machine backs up to the one half and i move my videos and whatnot from my internal over to the other half. now a couple of hours later it informs me that it is "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory". i say "ok" and force a back up only to have it back up 2.2MB and then just stay there, stuck. i restarted my comp and tried again, and again - it has been stuck on 2.2 MB so i dont know what the problem is.
*EDIT* ok so now i cancelled the backup and tried to start it over and it immediately goes to the " Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory" so i dont know..


Now as far as Boot Camp goes: I'm trying to partition 25GB of my internal HD to give over to XP and it tells me that i need to re format it into one single journaled hard drive first, and then put all my data i backed up back on before trying to bootcamp again (which im not about to do when Time Machine isn't even working, im not about to loose all my data) the thing is i have never partitioned before so it is a single hard drive, and i checked in disk utility and it says that is a "Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)" drive so what is the problem!?

AND if i do need to reformat my internal (even though i shouldn't have to) will time machine (granted i get it working) put all my data back? or should i not rely on it for that?

Ugh if you have ANY help to offer please, please do.

So far not that happy with Leopard.