That's how it ended in the internal HD in the first place. Unfortunately i need xp for work. i need to use lots of software that are not developed for mac.
Anyway I didn't quite do what I said unfortunately, to remove vista and osx. So, I managed to screw up my system again. This time I setup the osx partition as active but i forgot to remove teh bcd loader first. Now when i boot, the bcd loader comes up and osx boot says chainload error. xp doesn't boot since the active partition is setup to osx, and vista doens't boot either. when I try to look at the partition table using gpart from an external cd, well, suprise, suprise: my partitions are gone. However if i boot in osx from my external drive it still sees all my partitions but only mounts the xp system partition. Diskutil sees the partition but cannot operate on them since teh disk uses a fdisk partition scheme.
IS there a way to remove BCD now and restore my MBR without booting into windows? obviously something is screwed up in the MBR since from fdisk and gpart I don't see my partitions.