I have no experience beyond my own installation, but the steps were to update the firmware, partition, then install. Each step is possibly disasterous, but the install was what almost got me. Good thing I've done more than one XP installation in the past. You know how the XP installation goes, if there's no XP/NTFS-ish partition, the XP installer asks which partition you want to reformat. My Mac Partition showed up highlighted, and not the new XP partition. The new XP partition was all the way at the bottom of the list of partitions. I ALMOST hit return and almost destroyed my MacOS X installation! I can see how a lot of people would make that same mistake. My problem, therefore, was really with the Windows installer, and my own lack of careful reading.