Dual Boot Question

[bearyche]

Hello there. That's my first topic in this forum.

I own a laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens Core Duo T2500, 2 GB Ram, 120 GB Sata HD, NVidia 7600 GT).

I have a copy of Jas 10.4.7 and tried a lot of times to install it but none of them was 100% succesful meaning that either one partition was lost or xp couldn't boot.

 

Currently I have created one NTFS partition (90 GB) with Windows XP installed and I have left the rest of the disk space unpartitoned. (The XP installation CD characterizes that as unallocated disk space).

I would like to create a parition using Partition Magic and install Mac os there. Should I format the unallocated disk space as FAT32 primary or logical? (I prefer avoid using Disk Utility)

Suppose I do that and install mac os on the partition I have created with Partition Magic. Is there a way after the installation to be able to boot Xp as well or Acronis boot selector is the only way to go?

[Rammjet]

Create the partition. Format it as FAT32 if you want. The partition must be primary, not logical. It should be set Active. And you should set the type or ID as AF.

 

But during the installation, you must select Disk Utility in the Utilities menu and format the partition as MacOS Extended Journaled.

 

After installation, you can use the built-in OSX (Darwin) bootloader. Or you can set the Windows partition active, modify the boot.ini file and add the Chain0 file to C:\. Or you can install Acronis.

[bearyche]

After installation, you can use the built-in OSX (Darwin) bootloader. Or you can set the Windows partition active, modify the boot.ini file and add the Chain0 file to C:\. Or you can install Acronis.

Thanks for the fast reply but I am a newbie and I don't have a clue how to do all these things (after the installation). In one of my efforts after installing os x I couldn't boot XP at all. Which is the easiest/safer way to go?