[scubagarth]

Hi,

I have XP Home running very nicely on my MBP. For work purposes, I need to upgrade to XP Pro so I booted up into Windows, threw in the XP Pro CD, and began the upgrade process. During the first (of what I assume would be many) reboot, I eventually got a blue screen of death with an "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" message.

I'm saavy enough to recover my original XP Home installation, so no worries there.

Microsoft posts this KB article: "STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" Error Message When You Restart Your Computer or Upgrade to Windows XP, but it didn't help me very much. It is not a disk corruption problem, and I tried their suggestions with no luck. I doubt it is a 40 wire / 80 wire cable problem (or is it?). I'm not going to open up my new MBP to look, either.

Can anyone offer any insight into this issue? I even tried disabling UDMA support on my primary IDE controllers in Windows prior to the upgrade, in case that was an issue... but no luck. I have tried everything short of blowing the Windows partition away and installing a fresh copy of XP Pro. The problem is that I would prefer to upgrade my installation instead of wiping the partition -- and I'd hate to go through all of that effort only to run into the same problem!

I have to believe there is a way to make this upgrade work, some setting to change, something to tweak... (maybe doing something in the EFI that would trick Windows into thinking that UDMA was disabled in the BIOS -- of course there is no BIOS on the MBP, but Windows doesn't know that, so maybe there is some trick there...)

[ghporter]

You're right that it's not disk corruption, or you wouldn't have been able to recover your earlier installation. And the MBP uses SATA drives, not parallel ATA drives, so there's no 40/80 wire issue either.

I think the issue has to do with how the MBP's partition table works-it's different from what the Windows install routine is expecting-so Windows doesn't know how to deal with it.

It might work better if you saved your settings, programs, etc. to an external drive with the Windows migration wizard, and then just started from scratch with XP Pro instead of trying the upgrade route. More hassle, but this isn't what you'd call a typical installation either.

[scubagarth]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

You're right that it's not disk corruption, or you wouldn't have been able to recover your earlier installation. And the MBP uses SATA drives, not parallel ATA drives, so there's no 40/80 wire issue either.

I think the issue has to do with how the MBP's partition table works-it's different from what the Windows install routine is expecting-so Windows doesn't know how to deal with it.

It might work better if you saved your settings, programs, etc. to an external drive with the Windows migration wizard, and then just started from scratch with XP Pro instead of trying the upgrade route. More hassle, but this isn't what you'd call a typical installation either.

Thanks. I figured that's what would be spending my Friday vacation doing!

I've never tried the Windows migration wizard... does this actually restore program installations / registry settings? I'll have to look into it. Thankfully, since I'm only in Windows for work purposes, I only really need to install MS Office and a couple of other apps, so that won't be exceptionally difficult. I've also seen a lot of references to 'slipstreaming' and am going to do more research to see if that would be a way to create a flexible/modifiable "restore" point when it comes time to re-install Windows. Failing that, I'll pull out my old Ghost CDs and spin them up on my Windows partition.

[ghporter]

The migration wizard does indeed restore program installations with all the registry settings-your wizard output file can be hunormous. I think it does NOT migrate the programs themselves though, so you'll want to install the programs BEFORE restoring your settings with the wizard.

Slipstreaming is generally used for producing an install disc that includes SP2 from an original that doesn't, though there are some tools that slipstream as well as do other things-see the slipstreaming thread at the top of this forum.

Ghost is your best back up bet here, though.

Good luck!