[Geoff]

Hope this is the right forum for this and really hope some clever people can help me see through the fog.

After a couple of misfires I have installed XP via Boot Camp on a 32G FAT32 partition. Partitioned via Boot Camp and formatted within the XP Startup process. This is on a three year old iMac

Two issues have come up. First is that the Option key to select the boot up operating system does not function and you must choose the Startup choice from within whatever system you are in to switch

Second I try doing the updates and it hangs up at SP 3. It continually returns an error saying I need to create another 4 Meg for sufficient Uninstall space. The problem is there is pretty much 26G of free space!!! It provides no option other than kick me out of the install

So wizards of all things XP and BC I look forward to your insights and most appreciated problem solving and help

Geoff

[ibook_steve]

First of all, if option during boot does not bring up the startup selection screen, something is wrong. Exactly which iMac is this? Do you have the latest firmware installed? That may be the solution for both problems.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1557

Steve

[Geoff]

Thanks Steve. However all updates have been done on both sides and the problem still persists. The XP SP3 update issue has been solved but the Option thing still does not function

If it helps when I go to choose which place I want to start up from there is a Network Icon with a question mark along with the Mac HD and a Windows Folder choice. Strikes me a bit odd that it would be like that

BTw mine is a 2 Ghz iMac with 2 GB memory and uses an iMac Ident of 4.1

[ibook_steve]

I don't understand. That's what's supposed to appear when you hold option. Are you saying you can't boot into Windows when you select it from this screen? What exactly happens? The network icon is for booting from a network boot volume, though it usually does not appear.

Steve

[Geoff]

Yes Steve. I know that is what is supposed to happen. Since trying to reinstall XP (and having an authorized repair shop get past a problem where I tried adding XP via the Boot Camp Installer but had somehow misformatted the partition via Disk Utility. The machine would only look for a bootable CD which it did not read even when installed and the keyboard was not being read. I was locked in no man's land.

Since then I have (I thought) correctly installed XP via Boot Camp and got pretty much all of the updates installed but at no time has the Option Key worked as advertised since doing this and since this Network Icon has showed up.

I can only change systems by selecting the startup target within the OS I happen to be in at the moment

Color me a little bit confused! Do I need to redo and reformat the whole HD and then restore from my Time Machine backup and start the XP install all over again? Is there a simpler solution?

Thanks so much

[ghporter]

Have you reinstalled the Boot Camp utility? It sounds like it's not properly seeing the partition table-which could be as a result of the faulty partitioning issue you had earlier.

[Geoff]

That sounds interesting. How do I reinstall the BC Utility?