Boot Camp doesn't start Windows and can't even install it

Try another Windows install disc. It sounds like the computer works fine until you try to boot into Windows, perhaps you have a bad disc.

Also, for future reference, there is no such thing as an "upgrade-only" copy of Mac OS X. Even the CPU drop-ins that come with all of the transitional machines (read: machines available both with Tiger, and later with Leopard), are capable of installing fresh. The only thing they CAN'T do is install iLife '08 at the same time.

I'll admit that without getting my hands right on it, I'm stumped. I would take it into the nearest Apple-authorized place, and see what they can do.

I'm having a similar problem with my newly purchased 17' MBP 2.6Ghz 260 HDD 4GB Ram machine. This is the only thread I was able to locate that seems to be dealing with this related issue.

My problem:
I created a large Windows Partition (100 GB) in Boot Camp 2.0 and proceeded to install Windows via my Windows XP SP2 CD. The system reboots and the Windows CD starts to copy files to the /windows folder. When it boots back up to install Windows from the /windows folder on the HDD I get to the partition screen where I'm asked to identify which partition I would like my XP installation to be placed on. Instead of seeing a 100 GB partition I only see a 130 GB partition (my Mac partition) and a message that there is already a windows folder on this partition and that it must be replaced with the files on the windows xp CD.

Anyway, the first time I went through this process I ended up accidentally deleting my Mac partition! Without realizing what I had done, the machine would reboot and start copying all windows system files onto the newly formatted NTFS parition again. Luckily I had a time machine backup and could easily restore my Mac Partition.

Any ideas why my machine cannot locate my Windows partition once I get to the Windows installation phase? I created it with the Boot Camp 2.0. FYI, if I interrupt the Windows installation before I select which partition to install it on then Mac 10.5 can still mount the 100GB Boot Camp partition on my mac's desktop. It's labelled 'Boot Camp" (100GB). Thanks.

There is a whole forum on apple discussing this.

Apparently Apple isn't being helpful in acknowledging the drivers being responsible for the problem.

See this link
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....1850&tstart=60

i have xp installed and everything is fine. i only had a problem at the beggining cause i kept selecting leave files as are instead of selecting fat or the other one ( don't know the name forget ) besides that it installed fine and works fast. The drivers are a bit messed up though for the keyboard. besides that, tis all good.

first i have a macbook pro 15" 2.4gz the june 2007 release. i originally bought it with 160gb hard disk, 2gb of ram and with osx prior to leopard. i upgraded it to osx10.5, went out and bought winxp sp2 full intstall and followed instructions on bootcamp and everything worked great. i eventually bought vmware as well so i could boot into my bootcamp win parition from osx which although it was nice, it was slow as hell. so for me, everything worked great.

recently, i upgraded my hard drive to 320gb and upgraded my ram to 4gb instead of buying a new macbook pro b/c i'm poor, hehe. anyway, i took apart the macbook pro (go to macsales.com under tech support and there's a great video on how to take apart the macbook pro and install a new hard disk, memory and even a new dvd drive), put in the new 320gb hard drive, upgraded the memory and used leopard disk to restore my hard drive using time machine. it took a long time but it brought almost everything back which i was stunned and happy about. next time, instead of using time machine, i highly recommend just make a hard disk image to an external hard drive.

anyway, i tried installing bootcamp again and this time i had some major problems. i thought at first, is there a limitation to how big of a hard drive you can use. it didn't even recognize my winxp disc as a full install, it kept saying it was an upgrade cd. after trying diff winxp install discs, i was able to finally get it to start installing into the partition, but after the initial install part where you have the blue screen and copies all the setup files and needs to reboot, that's where the problem began. so i thought oh maybe i shouldn't have first installed winxp on my vmware using virtual machine. maybe bootcamp knows that i did that and won't let me install the same licensed winxp to bootcamp and virtual machine. but the key for me was, when during setup, it gets to the point where it asks where do you want to install winxp, you choose the bootcamp partition that bootcamp assistant created for you. then it takes you to another screen that asks if you want to leave the partition as is and move on or reformat. i chose to reformat using fat and that fixed the problem for me. everything worked after that.

hope this helps.