10.6 and XP dual boot suddenly stopped working?

[maxenten]

Hi, i have a dell mini 10v which i have been using for about 6/7 months now, and its been working perfectly all this time with an OSX 10.6 and XP dual boot.

 

But out of the blue its stopped working.

 

I installed it using the chain 0 method, (which lists XP and OSX in the boot choice menu.) If you select XP it should load straight into XP, if you select OSX it loads the chameleon bootloader which you can then boot into OSX from.

 

Now whenever i boot into XP i get the following message:

 

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manual for additional information.

 

 

 

If i try and boot into osx (with -v or -s) i get the following:

 

Loaded HFS+ file: [system/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist] 475 bytes from 10237360

Loading Darwin 10.6

Loading kernel mach_kernel

Loaded HFS+ file: [mach_kernel] 4096 bytes from 10237360

 

 

I dont understand whats happened as I havent made any hardware configuration changes or installed and software which may interfere with the partitioning table, boot.ini / chain0 files etc..

 

Both OSX and XP are on the same internal hard disk. Ive been searching about this for awhile and saw that it could be a loose cable connecting the hard disk? Is that possible?

 

Also, If i try to boot from the OSX install disc (which is on a usb stick) I get the same error as if i was trying to boot into OSX from the hard disk.

 

All of my University work is on both these OS's so i really need this sorted fast.

 

Thanks for any help.