boot camp partition help?

gm7cadd9gm7cadd9
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hello everyone, I have a problem with this new boot camp thing, I have tried a few times and followed the directions religiously, only to format my entire HD and end up with no bootable systems (xp or os x).







So, this time I have redone my system up to 10.4.6 and restored everything, made a backup, then made a bootable external drive so I could restore my info should this happen again.



With that being said, I have run the boot camp utility, I created a 10GB partition for Windows. I insert the disc and restart, the XP disc does its little load then eventually prompts me where to install it.



Here is where I am confused. Only one partition shows up, it IS labled C which is why I THOUGHT everything was fine, but shouldn't 2 partitions show up? It says that there are 131,000 MB available on this partition, do I go ahead and format this? Why doesn't the other partition show up? I would HATE to have to redo my whole system again, any help would be greatly appreciated.







*edit*



ok, so I grew impatient waiting so I found another XP disc in hopes that maybe that was the issue.



I opened up the boot camp utility and selected to pick up where I left off and the computer restarted using the XP disc. I got to the partition screen... same thing only 1 partition shows up, and the math doesn't seem to work... 131,071 MB is the size of the only available partition... this makes no sense to me, my drive is 149GB... the windows partition 10 gigs, why isn't it showing up???



So I get to the format screen and realize I SHOULD be more patient so I press F3 to quit and restart, help option and lo and behold 2 options I see a windows disc and a hard drive labeled windows... so once again I lost OS X and everything associated with it... please help I am on my backup computer typing this while my primary computer is restoring for a third time. Anyone?





thanks in advance,



-Roy

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    thinkingdifferentthinkingdifferent Posts: 1,604member
    Maybe bootcamp only shows partions that can be used for XP.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    noah93noah93 Posts: 168member
    The windows XP installer should show two partitions, so chances are you will erase your os x partition if you format with only one option.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    gm7cadd9gm7cadd9 Posts: 68member
    exactly what I have feared, so far I have heard all the same things... if only 1 partition shows up and I format it I will lose my OS X (which I have done 3 times now).



    I have re done my system and even re downloaded boot camp, I am just trying to isolate what is causing this, I thought maybe the initial boot camp partitioner didn't work, then I thought maybe it was my XP disc... which I am leaning towards that now.



    I tried 2 different XP discs, and on the format screen one of them only offered NTFS formatting, and the other disc allowed NTFS and FAT32. However both discs only saw 1 partition... very odd. Thanks for your help



    -Roy
  • Reply 4 of 8
    nostyleartnostyleart Posts: 47member
    this happened to me, i found no solution except moving osx to an external drive.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    slyinthedamslyinthedam Posts: 102member
    This might not help much, but it worked fine for me. Set an 8GB partition for XP, rebooted and could see 3 partitons, 1 was opbviously too small (boot partition?) 1 was obvioulsy too big (OSX) and the other was the right size and was a labled C.



    Everything went smoothly after that. Good luck.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    noah93noah93 Posts: 168member
    the reallly small (200MB) one is the EFI partition, DO NOT FORMAT OR DELETE THIS!!!



    - Noah
  • Reply 7 of 8
    gm7cadd9gm7cadd9 Posts: 68member
    Thanks for the reply, I tried that and the same thing keeps happening, I only see 1 partition, no matter what size I alot to the partition in the boot camp utility I only see one... I don't understand what is wrong, but I have heard from 3 other swho have had this same problem, so far they have just given up, which is what I have done for now...



    I will tackle this again when I am not so burned out and frustrated from wasting hours of my life to install an inferior operating system
  • Reply 8 of 8
    pubguypubguy Posts: 108member
    I had Boot Camp on my MacBookPro and followed the instructions exactly. Everything went smoothly and I installed XP SP2. That being said, dual-booting just wasn't for me so I went the virtualization route instead and used boot camp to get rid of the XP partition. However, once boot camp does it's partitioning and before you reboot into the XP CD, you can load Disk Utility --> click on your disk, then click the Partition tab to see what your new partition scheme looks like. This would be one way to be sure that the partition was actually created correctly before you even start the XP install process.



    If you don't need it to play games or intensive 3D stuff, give the Parallel's Workstation a try. Beta 3 is actually quite good and the speed is nice, plus you don't have to reboot your OS X to get to Windows.
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