I am not an expert but this is the way I have installed dual boot for various distros in the past, and it works for me.
I have two sata hard drives, XP on the first and Mint on the second.
This is far the easiest way to dual boot I have found so far.
I like to keep my XP MBR, don't like any linux distro overwriting XP.
I always set up a boot, a swap and the "/" partitions.
When installing Mint or any other distro that let's you choose where to put the mbr,
click on advanced and put your mbr on the first sector of boot partition, then carry on with the installation.
When you re-boot you will obviously only get Windows.
Now you download bootpart from
http://winimage.com/winimage.htm. Make sure the .exe is on the root C:\ partiton in Windows.
OK. Now run bootpart and you will see Mint there on your second drive.
You should get something like
1 type=83*, thats what you want,
type;
bootpart 1 mint.lnx Mint
exit
reboot
You should now see Windows XP and Mint.
This is my menu.lst
Also comment out, otherwise you will get that message and think it's not working.
# gfxmenu=/etc/grub/message.elyssa
title Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.24-18-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.24-18-generic root=/dev/sdb3 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.24-18-generic
title Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.24-18-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.24-18-generic root=/dev/sdb3 ro single
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.24-18-generic
title Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=/dev/sdb3 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic
title Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=/dev/sdb3 ro single
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic
title Linux Mint, kernel memtest86+
root (hd1,0)
kernel /memtest86+.bin
### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST
# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
chainloader +1
You can of course set up within Windows to make Mint the default.
Hope this helps