[BreadRecipe]

So I just got me a brand spanking new iMac with all the expensive bells and whistles. I installed some extra RAM and started to go to town. I need to run Windows to transcode and have every last resource available dedicated so Parallels and VMWare Fusion aren't options. I slipstreamed myself SP3 from SP1 Home edition. It's a good disk as I installed Windows from it onto a spare HDD in my PC. In boot camp I get as far as Windows checking for other versions of Windows installed, it can't find any obviously, then says hit enter to install a fresh copy. Then it waits a second and says it can't read the disk. Tried multiple disks with same result. Boot camp will read and start to install from a Windows disk I have from work that is SP2 natively, but alas, I have no product key and Windows gets pissed at me and I have to reformat and start again. Help. Please.

[BreadRecipe]

Oh yeah, and the only thing I've done to it is install the software updates

[lenox]

I'm pretty sure you need to do what Boot Camp says as it installs special drivers into the windows portion of things...

[ghporter]

Welcome to the MacNN Forums!

I think the first thing to do is to start over. Use the Boot Camp Utility to delete that Windows partition. Now boot from your OS X disc and run Disk Utility (under the Tools menu). Tell it to repair THE DRIVE, NOT the volume. It may or may not find anything, but you'll have that warm feeling that everything is working fine on the OS X side-including the Boot Camp Utility.

The combination of Apple's VERY fast optical drives and the Windows installer's paleolithic optical drive driver make for some bad issues, including not being able to read install discs sometimes. Since you just burned this, take a look at the optical surface of the CD very carefully and clean it very thoroughly-that often fixes this problem. Or you could try burning a fresh copy, but I don't think that would fix the issue. Instead, I'd slipstream SP2 with your original SP1 disc and then run SP3 AFTER getting it running.

And as lenox says, install the drivers FIRST, before you do anything else after the installer finishes. You NEED these drivers for the Windows system to properly see the hardware and thus provide all the proper cues to SP3.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

[BreadRecipe]

Thanks folks! I fixed it. Through Google magic, I determined that the copy of Windows I owned was not a "complete" edition of whatever they call it. It's a very archaic copy. Very original. After multiple partition and unpartition processes I used a spare license of XP Pro SP2 that my company had and bingo. Life is good. Now I can use me some Procoder with as much of the system resources that Windows can commander from the Mac "BIOS." Since Mac uses proprietary hardware and software it's very much different from any OS I've ever used. I have a Kubuntu server at home and a multi-boot machine at work with Windows, Solaris, PCLinux, and Fedora. It's a completely convoluted machine and serves no purpose other than learning the GUI of every OS I can get my hands on. Very tricky making Grub and KDE cooperate on the same HDD without wiping out some settings and /root files in each other. Anyway, thanks for the insight.

[ghporter]

Glad you got up and running. And while I guess my suggestion wasn't exactly perfect, it seems to have pointed you in the right direction...

You'll enjoy OS X; it's much like Windows in how you do things, but smoother, simpler, and more obvious most of the time. Oh, and the OS itself is both more stable and more secure than any Windows OS, and in my opinion more "finished" feeling than any Linux I've used. It's based on a *nix core called FreeBSD, so much of your Linux experience will be useful to you.

[lenox]

Yep...with the advent of OS X, my need for linux on the desktop was reduced to nil. Now I just use linux for headless servers.

I'm pretty sure you can tri-boot on a Mac, too, but I have never tried (dual boot Mac OS 9 and Linux is as far as I got - my first Intel mac is coming in the mail as we speak).