This paper investigates the fixed-time formation (FixF) control problem for second-order multi-agent systems (MASs), where each agent is subject to disturbance and the communication network is general directed. First, a FixF protocol is presented based on the backstepping technique, where the distributed cooperative variable structure control method is utilized to handle the bounded disturbances. Then, to remove the dependence of control gains on the global information, a practical adaptive FixF control is presented, where the MASs can achieve formation with a bounded error within fixed time. Finally, a numerical example is presented to validate the theoretical result.