Mac troubleshooting help
 

Ok, Windows strikes again...

I bought a new iMac and my sister wants my old one. So I wiped the drive and then installed OS X and then upgraded to Leopard. She wanted Windows installed on a partition so I brought up bootcamp and made the partition. Inserted my Windows XP cd and booted on the CD per the instructions. The damn windows can't recognize the partition made by bootcamp and only wants to install on the main partition where the mac OS is. So I figure I'll just reboot and go into Bootcamp again and fix it. Only problem is that the computer won't boot into the Mac OS anymore, it's like Windows has taken over and wants the Win XP cd in the drive to boot. I tried to boot holding down the D key but I just get a gray screen.

Any ideas?

The Windows XP is an old version, from back in 2001 or so. Would that matter?

You can`t have two OSs installed on the same partition, so if windows has taken over , OSX is gone!
Youl`ll have to reinstall leopard from the CD.

Aurel

boot OS X cd by holding C key

You need to use the Boot Camp Assistant (located in /Applications/Utilities) in order to install XP when you are in Leopard.

Sounds like you wiped over your OS X install, so you'll have to reinstall Leopard (hopefully that's a full install version and not the upgrade one), then use the Boot Camp Assistant to install XP.

Once you have both installed you can hold down the Option key at startup/reboot to pick which OS you want to run (or buy 3rd-party software like Parallels to run XP while still on OS X).

Ok I will boot from the Leopard CD and go from there. Stupid Windows. I never actually installed anything from the Windows CD, I hit the button to abort installation and restart the computer but it won't boot into Leopard. Anyhow, at least there isn't anything on this machine yet so I can just wipe and reinstall if I have to...

truer words were never spoken...

I think it has to be Windows XP *SP2* to work properly. You may want to check this before going through all the pain again.

That won't matter, he needs to create two partitions. Install windows first into one, and the Leopard into the other. The LILO boot loader will know how to deal with the Windows install.

I have the same question about the SP2 version of XP. I got Leopard reinstalled and the Bootcamp partition is there, the Windows XP installer can't recognize it though. Do I need a newer version of XP?? I'd hate to have to do this all over again because the same thing happened...

You need XP Home Edition or Professional with SP2.