Troubles With The Dual Boot

An update from This Post.

Last night:

UUUUGH, what a nightmare. I followed some online tutorials of people who claimed they had their dual boot computers working. ALL of them suggest installing Windows XP first. I did this, created 2 partitions (3 total – 1 for OSx, 1 for WinXP, 1 for a shared storage drive in FAT32). I dropped the ‘chain0′ file in the C:\ drive and edited the boot.ini to have Mac OSx listed at boot. Everything was going quite smooth until I went to install OSx. I was able to format the 2nd partition into MacOS Journaled; woopie. The custom settings I chose worked fine, the install peformed normally. When OSx rebooted after installing it hung; fuck. I tried googling the error, a few people had encountered this as well, but nobody gave a concrete answer. After digging through forum after forum, I ended up giving up for the night.

Fast-forward to today:

Still unable to get into either OS. Tried tinkering around more and going through random forum walk-throughs, but to no avail. I decided to try to install OSx again; perhaps I forgot a custom setting or skipped a step. Went through the install again; a-ha! I had missed one crucial step! OSx installs, and I am quite sure it will work now. I wait for the boot,…nothing…then the same error. Soooo, I try installing once more, different settings. Not working.

So now, I’ve given up dual booting by installing Windows XP first. I wiped the entire drive to all zeros to have a clean start. Partitioned the HDD into three again. Installed OSx; might I add, no errors this time? This leads me to believe that Windows XP screwed something up in the boot sequence (thanks Bill). The next thing to do is install XP and try my first dual boot strategy. This time things will go better than the last.