hi LT.
thanks again for all the really great help. not sure how many people caught that issue with the mac supplied chart...
OK, so here goes.
1. OK. i pretty much get this. i think on my 2006 that i do not have a recovery disk because i had a partition of win 7 on the boot drive. not sure if/how that applies to all this but thought to mention it.
2. from what i recall (i pulled the disk temporarily while i was dealing with another issue but can check here shortly) i /try/ to boot into windows 8 but i only get the angled blue windows icon. also when i first tried BCA it was confusing to me (as it related to the instructions i had from apple) that there was a step where i had to choose FORMAT. then when i tried to do a re-boot i had the DVD of win 8 in there and the USB stick with whatever was on that and between the three or four variables i may have gotten off track. ALSO, i had all four of my disks in the computer originally and when the DOS type prompt asked me /where/ i wanted to install win 8 i was seeing a Partition 0, Partition 1, Partition 2 for like four disks which was very confusing...
3. on the mac pro 2006 i am using 4.0.4. also, i realize now that as ilasss or you mentioned the 2006 did not support XP and i had to run some kind of ISO work around to get it on there. probably a complication that i forgot about which may be an issue here.
4. remind me how i format the windows disk as MBR again? i forget what this means. also - do i format as MBR and then literally insert the win 8 DVD and run the install to that disk? this seems VERY straightforward...
THANK YOU