WinXP boots to black screen, OSX gives chain booting error

[attention_getter]

Hey guys,

So, after days of forum hunting of similar issues, I was almost ready to reformat all the partitions (besides the ironically perfectly working Vista, and usually reliable Ubuntu), but I thought I'd ask here in case someone knows before I lay the hammer on this.

-Intel Laptop
-Main Bootloader: Vista.
-Using EasyBCD 2.0 Beta Latest Build as of December 27ish
-Boots: Vista/XP/Ubuntu 9.04/OSX.
All four were formerly fully operational at one point in time.

Now:
-The Windows XP does boot and shows me the great Windows XP sign with the blue scrolling bar, but after the blue scrolling bar, it just leads to a black screen.

-OSX doesn't boot at all, I don't see Darwin, I just get a message saying that "Chain Booting Error", which is supposedly really bad.

I'm thinking of just reformatting but if someone has any suggestions before I do this, that'd be great, because its still a hassle to reinstall all my XP programs (which is the only reason why I've been hesitating).

Sorry, this may or may not be a EasyBCD thing, so I apologize in advance if it turns out not being.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Terry60]

Hi AG, welcome to NST.
You're getting past the BCD into the post-boot stage of the OS startup.
I know nothing of OSX, so won't presume to advise on that.
Have you done any physical rearrangement of your PC ? New PCI card, new HDD, recabling the current HDDs ?
That could alter the PnP detection sequence and cause devices to change letter assignments if you're in the habit of letting the OS default its letters rather than defining them yourself (the only way to set them in stone)
XP seems to be exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia when the letter it boots as, doesn't match the registry entries for the location of its drivers.
If that's not the case, have you tried F8 immediately after selecting XP from the boot menu.
That will take you to the XP NTLDR extended boot menu where you can try "last known good ..." "system restore" etc.