Dual booting /w mac mini and shared partition

I bought a mac mini a few months ago, I wanted to replace an old macbook which died.
It had osx 10.4 on it, probably a beta or early bootcamp. I had a tri-boot system with
a "shared partition", but when I've tried on my mini I get into problems.
I'd like to have at least a windows 7, and osx partition and a larger, shared partition on same drive.
On my last attempt I left the drive as single osx. Let boot camp partition it, booted to cd, installed..
After installing, and updating, windows I partitioned the drive for the "shared partition" and rebooted.
I could reboot into windows but osx would hang while booting. I had to download and re-install the system.
BTW I am using a usb cd/dvd-rw drive to boot into my windows cd
Can someone help me figure out what I did wrong or provide a howto, guide or link to get me through this?
Thanks for visiting
Geo

What year/model Mac mini, new, used? What Mac OS are you using?
Pre 10.7 you could add two OS's and an extra partition without too much problem (running rEFIt, BootLoader, etc) but 10.7 added a wrinkle to that.
With Lion and any other OS (10.7 and Windows, etc.) you actually already have a "triple boot" system with the invisible "Repair Partition" added and Apple doesn't support any more.
Here's an older post but basically the same answer except with Lion and W7 adding an exception to the rule.
People have added more partitions but you would have to do a search here or do a Yahoo/Google to find the directions for doing it on one HD.
(I've only used rEFIt and it worked fine for me, not doing it on one HD, I have a MacPro so it's easier to just use another HD)
Other options,
You can always install the Mac OS on an external HD or even have the external as your Data drive or depending on how large or how many files you want to transfer there's also the Thumb drives.
And there's also Parallels/VMWare that you can use to transfer stuff until you need to boot into Windows natively.

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    Call Apple. You get 90 days or free telephone support
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