[La Muppet]

Hello,

I appear to have crashed windows XP whilst installing the drivers from the bootcamp CD. It went fine to begin with, then crashed and decided to shut itself down. On re-booting windows I now get the 'serious error warning-send report, message. However, the trackpad and the keyboard doesn't work any longer, so all I can do is shut down windows...

XP worked fine until I decided to install the drivers. i used the FAT32 format, apparently this is unstable - have I just experienced how?

I'm new to all this, and would appreciate a few pointers in the right direction ( uninstall bootcamp and start again? help, please, someone, anyone?! )

[ghporter]

FAT32 is no less stable than most file systems, it's just less "robust" in terms of surviving Bad Things Happening. To fix this, try holding the F8 key when XP starts booting and start it in Safe Mode. This omits most drivers loading at boot, and lets you fix a lot of issues caused by goofed up drivers and a fubared registry. It should use a default, built-in keyboard driver, so you should be able to use the keyboard. Once it's started, try installing the drivers again. If that doesn't work, you'll probably have to reinstall XP, but not from scratch.

[mac128k-1984]

Originally Posted by La Muppet 

XP worked fine until I decided to install the drivers. i used the FAT32 format, apparently this is unstable - have I just experienced how?

File Allocation Table format or FAT is anything but unstable. Simple design and easy to implement allocation scheme showed how popular and stable is really is by its longevity. While inferior to current designed and lacks journaling and security features that current file systems have now, its still a very capable format.

If anything I'd place the instability (and blame) on windows and not the hard disk format. Now that has a reputation of instability and flaws.

[La Muppet]

Hi again,

Windows didn't accept the F8 safe mode. I ended up booting from the windows CD with a borrowed usb mouse (by accident) and could then get the error message off the screen and re-install the drivers. It now works perfectly!

But thanks for your help, it is great to get a reply to what is, all things considered, a pretty basic query...

[ghporter]

It appears that something just didn't work right with your original XP installation, so when you tried to install the drivers, all heck broke loose (only heck because you were able to recover without a lot of grief). Usually when something unpleasant like this happens, a reinstall of XP is called for because it indicates a significant problem in the guts of the OS. But sometimes it's just because the driver that caused the system to choke was not read from the disc properly and Safe Mode is a simple way to go. Obviously the problem wasn't a particular driver but I/O handling in general, so reinstall was the only way to recover.

Windows is not really hard to deal with, nor is it particularly unstable by itself. It's when you do things like actually use the OS that oddness can happen. Seriously, the Windows OS just sitting there is almost completely unable to hurt itself, but when you run programs and have all that file interaction going on, the complex interaction of so many files within the OS gives it plenty of chances to screw up.

[wai-men]

Im having problems installing the drivers, after restarting i get a blue screen of death and windows doesnt load. I can only get into windows by pressing F8 and booting into Safe Mode, ive tried installing the drivers again thereafter but i just get the blue screen of death again.

Can anyone help?