So, when we want to dual boot windows & mac OS x, the way I preferred to do it is to load windows first, use windows partition to create 2 partitions, a bigger partition is for windows NTFS and only 100-200GB for Mac OSX because Mac OS can transfer files... ... from/to NTFS and not the other way around. If 1TB hard drive, I would use 800GB for windows & 200GB for MacOSx.

After windows installation is done or if we already have windows installed already, then use storage management in windows vista or 7 to shrink the disk about 200GB and make it active and even format it (ntfs or fat32 doesn't really matter). I'll post the screenshots of how to do this if I can find them.

Download EasyBCD1.7.2 to make a boot menu for this windows os first. I found it easier to fix the boot sector after the Mac OS installation. Assuming everything went fine with the MAC OS X installation, when we reboot, either the screen is black with a dos cursor or a black screen with windows warning that can't find boot records. Either way, we need the windows install disk (assuming we have an installation disk with the system, if not, then don't do anything with mac os). Go to bios and select boot from CD/DVD drive where we put the windows CD/DVD install disk.

When the windows starts to ask how to proceed, choose repair instead of install.

Of course, there's no boot record of any kind

click next, and select command prompt

Type diskpart in the command prompt, look for the disk that has windows os

Type: select disk 0, enter, then type: list partition, enter, then we will see all the partition inside disk 0

So, the bigger partition was my windows OS, which is partition 2, type: select partition 2, enter

Now, disk 0, partition 2 is selected (WINDOWS OS PARTITION), type: active

exit and reboot

If we've had EasyBCD1.7.2 set up for windows boot, it will just boot to boot menu without booting from cd/dvd. If not, we have to boot into the CD/DVD again to repair.

This time, it will see the windows start up problem since we set the windows boot sector to be active.

Now, we can have the boot menu with windows operating system, we need to go in the windows, run EasyBCD1.7.2 to add MacOSx as 2nd boot option in the menu, choose mac-x86 and reboot, then we will see this menu

The time out is set @ 30 secs, when everything is done and works well then, change it to 5-10 secs to boot quicker in the EasyBCD1.7.2 settings.