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Laminar · Dec 18, 2007, 02:40 PM

I'm trying to install XP Home SP2b OEM on a friend's MBP through Boot Camp. I partitioned the drive, inserted the CD, and restarted. It loaded all of the drivers and stuff from the CD fine, but when it went to boot Windows, it crashed, telling me that there was an error booting Windows, and giving me a few hex strings. Any suggestions as to what I can do?

Laminar · Dec 18, 2007, 03:01 PM

I just tried an XP Pro disc I have, and it booted fine, so I'm assuming this is a problem with either it being XP Home, or the OEM version, and I would assume it's the latter.
Here they claim XP Home OEM works fine.

Help!

medicman55 · Dec 18, 2007, 03:57 PM

Can you post any of the hex strings that post? Usually they can show you what is wrong with it.

Laminar · Dec 18, 2007, 10:47 PM

The hex was 0x0000006F, 0xC0000020

Some quick Googling tells me it's a problem with the DVD drive, and using another one would be the solution. I don't actually have any kind of external optical drive I could use for this. Would it be possible to image the CD to a flash drive or external hard drive?

Laminar · Dec 19, 2007, 09:42 AM

I tried booting from an external DVD drive at work, but I'm getting a folder with a question mark. This kinda sucks. Any more suggestions at all??

ghporter · Dec 19, 2007, 09:56 AM

It is NOT an issue with XP Home, but it may indeed be an issue with that particular disc. Macs' DVD drives tend to be kind of sensitive to cruddy CDs that a regular-or older-CD drive would just gloss over, so if the Home disc is dirty or scratched (even just a little) it could cause enough errors that Windows can't install from it. Oh, and the Windows installer doesn't bother to tell you if files aren't copied properly; it probably doesn't even bother to check. So you find out about this sort of thing the hard way.

As for booting from an external drive, Windows isn't built to do that. The question mark is probably related to the external drive being able to read the disc, but even if you got it going, once the Windows installer rebooted, it would lose the connection-Windows (including the installer) re-enumerates USB ports on boot, and generally doesn't connect to firewire ports until very late in the boot process (too late for the installer to work) if it connects during boot at all.

Suggestions: clean the disc carefully, or use another machine with a slower optical drive to image the disc and burn it to a fresh disc (this often helps immensely). This is NOT a Mac problem, though Macs are susceptible to it. I've had perfectly good, original Microsoft discs fail to install just because of a smudge or worse, a picky drive.

Laminar · Dec 19, 2007, 10:44 AM

The CD is brand new, so I didn't think there would be problems with it, but I went ahead and made a copy, and what do you know, the installer ran just fine. Except when it went to restart, I got a "Disk error, press any key to restart." message. Startup Disk recognizes the boot camp partition as containing Windows, but it won't boot. Do I need to boot from the XP install CD and run some sort of recovery? Should I have told the XP installer to format the partition as NTFS?

Laminar · Dec 19, 2007, 11:32 AM

Okay, from within the Windows installer, I reformatted the Boot Camp partition as NTFS (not quick). Setup ran, it installed, upon reboot the Windows logo and everything showed up, but then ANOTHER blue screen.

This time, it's 0x000000ED, etc. Windows help tells me it's due either to the hard disk controller being UDMA and not having the right size cable, or it's a damaged file system.

Laminar · Dec 19, 2007, 02:17 PM

Okay, I finally got it. Under OS X, I opened Boot Camp and returned the drive to a single partition.

Then, I re-did the Boot Camp partitioning, once again allotting 15GB to Windows. I rebooted to the (burned) CD, and when it asked where to install, I told it to reformat the FAT32 partition using FAT32 (quick). It reformatted, copied, rebooted, and installed fine. I'm installing the drivers from the Leopard DVD now.

ghporter · Dec 19, 2007, 07:08 PM

That installer can be pretty much a pain when it wants to be. Glad you got it working!

Tomchu · Dec 19, 2007, 08:15 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Oh, and the Windows installer doesn't bother to tell you if files aren't copied properly; it probably doesn't even bother to check.

Except that it does.

ghporter · Dec 19, 2007, 09:21 PM

Originally Posted by Tomchu

Except that it does.

I have received "cannot find file xxx" errors, but not any that indicated that a file was miscopied-though I have experienced a number of situations where that was indeed the case and the machine would not properly run. Does the installer actually give you any such error messages, or do you know that it checks from some other source? I would LOVE to be able to turn on some sort of "verbose" mode now and then to see what the heck was going wrong with a troublesome install.