That's an interesting idea. I always installed Windows to the first drive when I dual booted with Redhat. That is when there was a primary and secondary ide port on the mainboard. Out of force of habit I still install Windows 7 on the sata cable #1, even if it doesn't matter.
If he has XP installed on an IDE drive, that means he installed it with the Bios in IDE mode. The Bios is changed under SL to AHCI. I see posts wondering how to change XP to AHCI mode so perhaps that has a bearing on OP's issue.
The OP appeared to want to have a pure Hackintosh method. That is likely to involve some "hassle" as I doubt you would give even money that your solution will fix the problem.
If this were Windows 7 and SL then Easybcd would be at least a 10 to 1 favorite to work.
http://thegadgets.net/trickt-boy/tips-a ... 7-on-a-pc/
I've used this and it's less than a four minute solution including download.
But despite what the Wikipedia says, XP -64 and Mac don't work out of the box with Easybcd.
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index. ... ntry577095 Macgirl, Post #2
"Just one observation, in order to boot XP it needs that device points to "BOOT" instead of C:\ [SH: Doesn't your solution, edit boot.ini, reside on the C:\ root?}
I created the BCD file on XP in Fusion. Files needed: bootmgr and Boot\BCD
I also included the NST\nst_mac.mbr BCD contains 2 entries, one for XP and other for Mac OS I gues it needs to be reconfigured in order to recognize your Volume/Disk
Here is the attached file: Attached File bcd.zip ( 433.15K )"
SH: So this will work since the first drive will be Windows and active to bring Easybcd.
I wouldn't call this a hassle free solution. I think the problem is Chameleon. After the release of MutiBeast 3.03 with the new Chameleon RC, I ran Chameleon again hoping to overwrite Ubuntu's grub since the Chameleon bootloader looks better. It didn't work. And I've seen no reference to an analogy of the Grub update command for Chameleon.
There are nonetheless posts reporting XP and SL dual-booting. What about editing com.apple.Boot.plist?
Begin quote:
Type diskpart
Type select disk 0
Type list partition
(Then look at the partition list and figure out which one is your XP)
Type exit
The number identifying that partition is what you'll use in place of my number 3 below, if different.
Reboot into Snow Leopard, open finder and in the search bar type (or copy and paste from this):
/Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist
This will come up with two files, one is the main file and the other is the backup. Clicking on either will display the folder it's in at the bottom of the window - you want the one in Extra, not Extra.bak. Select the file in the Extra folder but don't open it yet.
Where the Extra folder is now displayed along the bottom, right click on it and select Get Info. Scroll down to Sharing and Permissions, click the padlock to open it. Enter your admin password.
I then changed the permissions for both Wheel and Everyone to Read & Write since I didn't know what they did Close the padlock.
Right click on the /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist file and Open With using TextEdit. Insert the following lines:
<key>Default Partition</key>
<string>hd(0,3)</string> [SH: Use your XP partition value, not necessarily as shown.]
..into the section with similar text. I put mine just before the timeout 5 seconds option, but I don't know if it matters.
Save and exit TextEdit. Change the two permissions back to Read Only. Reboot and test, and it should boot into XP." End Quote
