Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Hi everyone, i am having a problem w/boot camp and windows on my mac (bought mid 2007) I partition the drive and then when i insert the windows xp disc (xp home sp2 oem) and click start installation the computer restarts and spits out the xp disc and then says "insert bootable disc and press any key (or something along those lines). I've removed the partition and tried again several times but the same thing happens everytime.

My macbook has leopard installed so im using the bootcamp that came w/it. The windows xp disc installs fine on vmware fusion (i tried it this morning) but i can't get it to work w/boot camp.

Here is my firmware : Boot ROM Version: MB21.00A5.B07
SMC Version: 1.17f0

I really have no idea what to do and would appreciate any help yall can give me. Thank you.

Not sure if OEM XP disk will work with Boot Camp...

Steve

What type of disk would i need then?

If it's a complete XP disc, whether it's OEM or not, it will work. However, some manufacturers provide a "restore" disc which is not a standard, bootable XP install disc. What "OEM" disc to you have? (As in what computer manufacturer/vendor did you get it from?)

I got it from someone so im not sure where it came from but it was sealed and has a product key. How would i know if its a restore disk? Is there a way to make it bootable if it is?

Also, i dont know if it matters but it does work in fusion.

If it has one of those 20-or so character long alphanumeric keys, it's probably a complete, bootable disc. Here's how to see if it will actually boot in your computer: put the disc in the drive, and once OS X recognizes that it's there, select "Restart" from the Apple menu. As soon as it shuts down, hold the 'C' key, which will force the computer to boot from the optical drive. It "should" boot into the Windows installer, at which point you may want to just go ahead and install XP - making sure that you select the partition labeled "C:" when asked where to install.

Thank you, i'll try that when i get home tonight, so if i partition in bootcamp, and then boot the cd (if it works) like u recommended, if i intsall it that way it will be on the bootcamp partition correct?

I tried that and it did that same thing, spit the disk out and said the same thing, now what should i do, i hope i don't have to buy another copy.

It's possible that the disc is defective or dirty. Macs' optical drives seem to be both very fast and very sensitive to minor dirt and defects; I've had Macs refuse to boot from (and sometimes refuse to read from) CDs that a Windows computer would read without any problem at all because the PC had a slower optical drive. In those cases I've made a full copy of the disc on the PC and the burned copy worked fine in the Mac.

So did u just pop the xp disk in and a blank disk and use something like nero and just make a copy, or is there something extra i have to do?

Yeah, you should be able to make a copy like that, using a program's 'copy' function (e.g., like on Toast or, in your case, Nero).

I used Roxio's Easy Media Creator, but Nero will do fine too.

I am having exactly the same problem, but on an iMac, so there is no internal optical drive...I'm attempting to load the OS using the OEM install disk from a firewire connected optical drive. There isn't any other way to do it, as far as I can tell. You can't just add an internal drive to an iMac, alas. How can I test if the disk is good...or is the fact I don't have an internal disk drive part the problem?

I have a 20" 2.4 Intel Core2 Duo iMac. All firmware updates. The disk is brand new from a reputable dealer I've used before to buy XP Pro OEM for using in custom builds. I thought the only difference between OEM and retail OS disks was the lack of instructions and lack of fancy box...

I assume you've solved this by realizing - from your other thread - that your iMac's optical drive is on the side.