Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

I can't find the any key.

Seriously though. I have a fresh 10.5 install. I have bootcamp assistant make a 32GB partition for windows then have it start installing. It does it's thing, then it gets to a:

"Press any key to boot from CD. Disk Error. Press any key to restart"

If I press a key when it's in the "press any key to boot from CD" part, it just reinstalls whatever piece of windows I had up until that point. This knowledgebase article: Mac OS X 10.5, Boot Camp: Windows XP displays "Disk Error" message during initial setup says that I need to format the windows partition before continuing with the rest of the setup process, the problem is I'm never offered that option. I'm following along in the document that boot camp has me print off. I've been looking through the apple discussion fora and noone there seems to have much of an answer either.

So ya. fresh install of 10.5. 2.16CD2 imac. 2GBs RAM.

any assistance?

Windows has a huge problem with its installer-it doesn't tell you explicitly that during the install process it will reboot at least once (usually twice) and that you can just let it go to it WITHOUT REBOOTING FROM THE CD. During the install process, the installer makes a few tweaks to the boot.ini file which tells Windows what source to boot from, in this case, the partial installation. It SHOLD tell you "Windows will now reboot. DO NOT select to boot from the CD." But it doesn't.

You're nowhere near alone in this. I've been caught by this more than once, usually when I'm called away from the process and lose track of whether I actually got it started or not. It's all cool-just let it time out and continue on its merry way, and Windows will be installed in due time.

Thanks for the response...

The other thing is, and I probably didn't mention it, is after I let it go past the "reboot from CD" part the system goes unresponsive. I have a wireless keyboard so I plugged in a USB one to "press any key to restart" and it didn't do anything. Sooo. You mention letting it time out, but it just sits there. I know because I let it sit there for a while when I went out to lunch. ha.

Any other idears?

Have the wired keyboard plugged in from the start. After everything is installed and you install the Apple drivers, then you can use your wireless keyboard. If you didn't have the wired keyboard installed from the beginning, the installer won't re-scan the USB ports to see if something has been installed after it started. Fortunately the process is relatively quick and you can go back to your favored keyboard shortly. This USB thing is another "gotcha" from the Windows installer.

I had both the wired keyboard and the wireless one attached during the second and third try at getting it to work. I could hit the key on the wired one to do the "boot from CD" sequence. Once it was past that, I couldn't do anything.

edit: Just tried again with wireless keyboard off and just the USB keyboard plugged in. Still unresponsive.

That's "just not right." Since you haven't gotten very far in the process, maybe you should undo everything and start over. Use the Boot Camp Utility to delete the Windows partition, run Disk Utility to make sure nothing got messed up, (probably reboot just to be sure), and try again.

Thanks for your help, Glenn.

Been there, done that too. I'm going to grab a different XP CD from work and see if that makes any difference.

That would be the next step. It does sound like there's something wrong with the one you've been using if you've started over from scratch. Good luck!

Well. It must have been the disc. I burned a new one from an ISO from our MSDN binder at work and all is well. It asked me all sorts of stuff it didn't ask before. Heh.

Thanks again for your help, Glenn.

Same probleme as the OP here. Same system, same error message, same "any key" to press, same unresponsive windows.

The message on the apple support center says : "After creating a Windows partition in Boot Camp 2.0 in Mac OS X 10.5, then rebooting from the Windows XP installer CD, be sure that you format the Windows partition before continuing with the rest of the Windows XP setup process". So i guess I am not the only one with that problem.

What does that mean ? Should I have an option to format after rebooting on my windows CD ? I don't, the thing just install itself ..

It seems the answer to the OP's problem was to change windows. Unfortunately I don't have that choice, my disc is the only one I can get my hands on for the time being. I'll try to lurk more to find answers.

Halp !

edit : My problem exactly, and the op's problem too i think Mac OS X 10.5, Boot Camp: Windows XP displays "Disk Error" message during initial setup

Update on the situation in case anyone has the same problem :

The heart of the problem seems to originate from the windows CD, or my version of windows. I have Win XP + SP2.

The message on apple.com makes it clear that after using Boot Camp and partitioning, the computer restarts on the windows CD and THERE, after it loads you are supposed to format C:/ to whatever format you like. Then the install should work fine after this point.

However, my windows CD does not ask for formating ... it only asks for formating when I ask him to partition again in the setup menu. Otherwise it analyzes the drive, decides the FAT32 partition is good enough for him and proceeds to install. WITHOUT asking for formating. Which leads to the "error, disk failed, gb/OSX"

So after much thought, I tried to partition the drive using the winXP setup menu. In order to do so I :
- Deleted the partition Boot Camp created
- Created a new partition
- Formated it to NTFS (also tried FAT32, same result)

The result is that the partition is not recognized when windows reboots for the first time after the initial file copying. Some "Hal.dll is corrupt" message appears after the first reboot. A little lurking told me that this message appears when the boot.ini file is not properly configured, and doesn't recognize the partition windows is supposed to be on. So I guess deleting and recreating the partition Boot Camp created isn't a good idea either.

I then tried to format the Boot Camp partition from Disk Utility in OSX to another file system (namely osX compatible versions with or without page addressing or whatever it is called) to force the windows setup into formating to a proper FAT32 or NTFS file format. This was to no avail, the winXP setup only sees one big C:/ partition instead of two (my OSX system and the Boot Camp one). As I have no plans to delete OSX I had to backtrack.

So here I am atm. Future plans include finding a Bootable CD to format the C:/ drive and bypassing this stupid setup bug. Any other ideas would be appreciated.

Are you SURE it's a SP2 disc? My feeling now is that the disc I thought was an SP2 disc was not. Check the EULA.txt file.

I definately had the same exact problem! However, after i got the disk error I tried rebooting and now i don't have any video or anything. i've tried:
1) Held down "C" and booted up with my leopard install disc in the drive
2) Held down the option button to specify the boot device
3) Removed internal battery and held the power button on for 5 seconds to clear
4) Resetting the PRAM with command, option, p, and r keys pressed
5) Tried a different monitor (off another working computer)
6) Held down the shift key while booting up
7) New video card
8) the smc_reset button

All with no success! All i have is the steady flashing light on the front no patterns just a steady slow flash. I can hear the fans and the hard disk spin up. Anyone else have this problem right after the windows disk error?

Check that disc. The optical drives in newer Macs tend to be more sensitive to cruddy CDs, and they don't manage error correction (if that's possible) the way the installer really needs. So if the disc isn't working, it's probably because that drive can't overcome the problems on the disc. Burning a new copy, if you can, is a good solution. Here's how: use one of the "slipstreaming" tools mentioned in the slipstreaming thread above to make a custom install disc on a Windows machine-preferably one with a CD drive, even better an older one, that you'll read the original disc with. Slipstreaming allows you to (at the very least) include SP2 with a non-SP2 edition of Windows. Some tools like nLite let you alter settings and other stuff (very cool stuff too). Either way, you're creating a valid NEW disc that should read in your Mac's drive.

Ok, updates here:

The problem was definitely the CD. I got my hands on a slipstreamed version, and right enough it proposed to format the drive I wanted to install windows on. Everything went smoothly from here on. NO MORE "DIRSK ERROR" MESSAGE. So, guys, this is the source of it I would say.

Smoothly ? Let us see ...

When I restarted after installing the macbook pro drivers from the leopard CD (in windows) my laptop screen's colors got all messed up.

I tried 3 kind of video drivers to fix this to no avail. And after like the 10th restart, the problem got to macOS X ... Which now has jumbled up saturated colors too. My secondary display is fine though.

I tried :
- GPU driver change > no good
- reinstalling windows > no good
- repartitionning and reformatting everything and reinstalling macOS from time machine > no good

So, where will this end ?

I lurked a bit to find that this seems to originate from firmware colliding with the drivers. But this belongs in another thread.

The solution to the "disk error" message at the beginning was to change disks as the op did. There's no going around it I could find. (and i tried).

Due to the way the Windows Installer is made, there IS no way around the bad CD issue. The installer isn't built to tell you when it can't PROPERLY copy files to the hard drive, only that it can't find them (and it's pretty stupid about that, too). So there's no warning, no notice, just a goobered installation to tell you what's going on.

It sounds like your new problem is an incompatible screen resolution. This happens, and it's a pain, but it's fairly simple to get sorted out.

Boot into Windows, and at the start of the black screen portion of the process press "F8". That'll allow you to get into Safe Mode. Choose the basic Safe Mode and let the boot process continue-it'll be longer than normal and pretty verbose on screen. Once you're fully booted, right click on the desktop and choose Properties (or navigate to Displays in Control Panel). Now you're in the display driver properties and you'll be able to select a screen resolution and color depth from the Settings tab. Choose a low resolution, no greater than 1024Xwhatever, choose any color depth, and "OK" your way out. Now reboot. This should have resolved the screwy video for you. Now get back into the driver properties and go back to Settings. Choose the Adapter tab and click on the button at the bottom labeled "List All Modes." Choose the best mode for your display-probably something like "1440 X 900, True Color, default refresh rate" (I'm looking at it in Parallels using the Parallels driver, so your specific details may be different). Depending on your settings, you may need to restart to see the result.

Yes, it's WAY more involved than it needs to be, but there it is. Fortunately, this process shouldn't take more than a few minutes and you'll either know whether it was indeed a screwy resolution setting or something else pretty quickly.

^ He mentions a second monitor, I would say to disconnect that while initializing/installing windows. Bringing that to the party right off the bat could be causing some problems.

I'm going through this too with my Rev A MacBook and a clean Leopard install. I'm not using an external display or USB keyboard (I use the built-in ones). After the first reboot of the Window XP SP 2 installation I get a "Disk Error / Press any key to restart". Pressing keys on my MacBook results in nothing.

To get back, I have to unplug from AC power and remove the battery, and rebooting the machine again pressing the Option key and selecting my Mac OS X partition. I then use the Boot Camp Assistant to remove the partition and try again.

UPDATE: I've gotten it to work by having the Windows XP installer format the partition NTFS (*not* convert...actually format it). My Boot Camp partition is 48GB of my 160GB drive. Boot Camp makes it FAT32 but Windows doesn't like that (other operating systems can read/write >32GB FAT32 partitions). All seems well now.

Voch

The formatting utility in the XP installer is built to go up to 32GB-it's a bit of legacy code from Win2K which someone in Redmond should be fired (from a big canon would be a good way) for using in XP. XP can reside on ANY SIZE disk or partition, but it's brain-damaged installer can't format it larger than 32GB. Dumb, Bill, very dumb. There are ways to get OS X to be able to write to NTFS partition, so that's not a big problem, it's just a stupid thing to have to use a particular format AND size to get XP happy with your system.

I was having this very issue with my BootCamp install with the "Disk Error Press any key to restart" but "by having the Windows XP installer format the partition NTFS (*not* convert...actually format it)" worked great and now it's installing XP without an issue.

Thanks