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Zippochild · Sep 7, 2007, 11:53 PM

I got my macbook pro back in april, and have been running bootcamp/windows xp on it since then with no problem at all. Sure, xp runs a little weird, but thats expected. About 4 days ago though, i decided to boot into windows from OSX. So i rebooted my MB and windows gave me the BSOD before it even finished loading. This is very sudden, and i cant come up with anything that wouldve cause such an issue. I can still acesss the drive from OSX, i just can't boot into it. Using a startup disc didn't help either. I have a sneaking suspicion that the drivers may be an issue involved, but im not sure. Any ideas on a solution would be appreciated.

Mike

ghporter · Sep 8, 2007, 06:50 AM

Welcome to the MacNN Forums!

Drivers don't cause BSODs on startup. A corrupted or missing Registry file or other critical file is almost always the culprit.

You say "Using a startup disc didn't help either." What do you mean by that? If you boot from your XP install disc you can repair the XP installation in a couple of ways. Using the Recovery Console is the hard way; performing a "repair installation" is much easier and more likely to fix everything in one pass. Follow these instructions to do the repair installation. It will NOT overwrite your data nor alter anything about installed programs.

Let us all know how things go.

Zippochild · Sep 8, 2007, 09:10 AM

When i referred to the startup disc not really accomplishing much, i was really hoping that i could get it to boot from the cd so i could run a repair on it. Not the case at all. I trird doing a repair installation, but not all that far in windows told me that i had to format the partition i was trying to install it to. I would really rather not kill off all my stuff. The partition is pretty much full (roughly 150 mb left on it) though, so is there chance that i could skip the formatting by just stripping out some junk?

ghporter · Sep 8, 2007, 03:26 PM

If you can't get it to boot from the install disc, then you have some really big problems-and not necessarily with Windows itself.

You have mentioned that you can access the partition from OS X-this is good. Copy and back up all your data files from within OS X. Once you've done that, go to the Boot Camp Utility and select "restore startup disk to a single partition." That will wipe out your Windows partition and restore everything to the way it was before. As a final step, boot the Mac from the OS X install disc and select Disk Utility from the Tools menu. Choose the whole disk (not just a volume on the disk) and tell it to repair the whole thing. It may find nothing to fix, but you never know... From there, you can get started rebuilding your Windows installation.

Zippochild · Sep 8, 2007, 06:21 PM

alright. thank you for your help.