[Craig Denton]

I have upgraded to lion and wish to run XP. Bootcamp will not do it so I have used a free piece of software that allows me to do it (can't remember the name). It loaded and I had XP running without a worry. I have turned it off and back on again but it keeps looking for the XP boot disc and does not open Lion. Any ideas? I only chose a small size for the windows patroon and it formatted it very quickly so I assume it didn't scrub the whole hard drive. Anyone else had this issue and can offer some advice?

[ghporter]

Welcome to our forums! Would that "free piece of software" be "VirtualBox" by any chance? That's what I use to run Windows on my MBP, simply because it was quick and easy to set up and run. From your description, it's probably not VirtualBox, so I'm going to assume you're actually booting the machine into Windows.

Here's what to do: when you boot the computer, hold the "ALT" key as soon as the boot chime sounds. Hold it down until the boot manager shows up. You should get a screen that offers your OS X boot partition, your XP partition and anything that might be in the optical drive. Simply use your mouse or the arrow keys to select the partition you want and the computer will boot into that OS. I suggest you select Lion, then go to Settings-there should be an item in the System section called "Startup Disk," which will let you choose the default boot OS. From there, I think you need to repeat the setup of XP so that the boot manager can find it correctly.

I hope this helps you out, and again, welcome to our forums.