Welcome to the forums!
How long do you have the screen with the flashing underscore? It's pretty typical to see that for a second or two before the machine switches into BIOS emulation and looks for bootable partitions. If you see it for a long time, it means that there's something keeping the machine from finding a (BIOS) bootable partition. On the other hand, what you should see if there's a boot problem is an error message that tells you what the problem is. Either the EFI system saying it can't do the emulation correctly, an emulation message that says it couldn't find a bootable partition, or a Windows message that says it couldn't load the OS for some reason.
Unfortunately, OS X cannot natively do anything but read an NTFS partition, so it wouldn't be very helpful to poke around in the root of that partition unless you find one of the kernel extensions that gives OS X native NTFS support. But in my experience, it's better to fix an XP installation by booting from the install disc and using the Recovery Console (usually to apply the "fixmbr" or "fixboot" commands).
But you can't really fix the thing if you don't know what's really going on, and we can't help you much without more information. What Mac do you have? What version of Boot Camp? Which version of XP? And of course, how long do you get that flashing cursor and does it ever resolve to anything else?
Top
