# Warning: Do not abort a Boot Camp Windows Install



## slandimac (Jan 9, 2008)

Hi Everyone,

As part of the Apple community I thought I would write down my recent experience with a friend of mine who purchased a brand spanking new iMac. Since this was his first Mac and he had never used OS X before he asked if I would go over and give him a hand with it. 

Let me add that I had spent months convincing him to switch to Mac as he would really like the experience and he would get a more stable and usable machine overall.

Alright, so back to that faithful afternoon when I showed up at his house and we carefully unpacked his iMac and both of us just stood there admiring the design and the simplicity of this wonderful piece of technology. We went through the normal process of starting up Leopard for the first time with its language questions and profile wizard culminating with the fly-through space and finally the new Leopard desktop. Everything up to this point was working flawlessly and my friend was very enthusiastic.

OK on to the next step, since one of his requirements was to run video conferencing through MSN Messenger we had decided to install Windows XP through Boot Camp, a process which I thought was going to be pretty straightforward. So we started the Boot Camp assistant and since he wasn't going to be using XP for anything but Messenger and another application we decided to go with a smaller partition size of 15 GB. So we set up this partition in Boot Camp and then following the instructions we placed the XP CD in the iMac and continued the assistant. The iMac then restarted and the XP install showed up on the screen. At this point I must say I had a surreal and rather uncomfortable experience as I sat there looking at the initial blue XP install screen and looking down at the Apple Logo on the front of the iMac, it just didn't seem right! But I digress, ok so the set up continued and at one point the system shows the partitions that are available for installing XP, now if you recall we had asked for a 15 GB partition, however what the XP install was reporting was a C: partition of 133 GB which was 50% of the drive eventhough we had not set this up in Boot Camp. So fearing that we were about to overwrite the OS X partition my friend and I both agreed that we should abort the XP install and I hit the F3 key to end the install process. The computer then obliged and restarted, however instead of showing the welcome and comforting apple logo it just showed a grey screen with no apparent other activity. Now to make a very long and frustrating afternoon short, let's just say I dug deep into my toolkit of both PC and Mac experience and tried everything to re-install OS X and get his iMac to restart. Nothing worked, the computer was completely useless. Below in point form are all the steps I tried to revive this ill-fated iMac.

1. Put in the Disk 1 Install of Leopard and held "C" while starting
2. Tried holding down Option key while starting
3. Tried starting in Safe mode
4. Tried the above using another Mac in Target mode through Firewire
5. Tried forcing a start from a bootable USB Drive

None of these attempts yielded any results and when I called Apple Support they were very kind and listened to me drone on and on and suggested I bring it to the, you guessed it, the genius bar. So with sick iMac and my now distraught friend in tow we went through the door of our local Apple store and bellied up to the bar. My experience over all was pleasant however what the genius told me had me in disbelief. He said that this was a known issue and the reason why the iMac would not restart even with the "C" key was that it could not find a bootable installable HD as the partition table had been corrupted by the windows install. When I queried him as to whether it would have been better for us to simply continue the install eventhough the set up was reporting the wrong partition size he said that it would have been preferable as then the system would have had a bootable XP partition which then could still have been seen by the OS X install if the Mac OS X partition would have been wiped out as I feared.

OK all this to say that if you are going to install XP on your Mac then follow the instructions exactly, choose the 32 GB partition size and follow-through with the install no matter what the set up reports as partition sizes, this way even if something were to happen to your OS X partition your HD will remain in a state to have OS X re-installed. 

My friend's mac in currently in the hands of Apple and he will get it back in 3-5 days as they will remove the HD and reformat it and re-install OS X. Once he gets it back I have suggested very strongly that he use Parallels to run XP as it will not require any partitioning of the disk and this way he can keep his Mac running the OS X that it was intended to run.

Sorry for the rather long post, but I just felt I had to share this information with all of you.

I also ask those of you who are more experienced, even if the HD partitions had been wiped out, wouldn't the OS X install be able to see the drive and re-format it? Could it be that the HD was shot and that they simply didn't want to tell me that for fear of displaying an unreliable product? Perhaps I'm grasping at straws, but I've rebuilt several iBooks and have over 18 years experience working with PCs, I have never come across a working hard drive, partitioned or not that couldn't be seen by an OS install. I'd love to hear all of your comments on this.

thanks,

Stefano
slandimac

Mac Mini PPC
iBook G3 12" 500 Mhz in pieces awaiting rebuild
iPod Video 30 GB


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## r1dgeline (Jan 15, 2008)

unfortunate circumstance but a good read for future references


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## Adrian. (Nov 28, 2007)

Sorry for your bad experience. Similar experiences have happened when I convince friends to get macs, preaching their superiority, and then something like this happens. I feel like a fool.

There are some people who are highly experienced experts with this sort of stuff. There was a lady who completely fried--physically-- her HD through partitioning and boot camp. There were some people here who helped her get most of her data back.


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## Eric0 (Nov 22, 2007)

I had a similar experience with my Macbook Pro. I had a 25Gb partition at one point. However, I seldom use windows so I deleted my partition and installed VM ware fusion. Didn't like the program for lack of hardware acceleration and went back to bootcamp. Ended up with the same grey screen your talking about.

A friend of mine fixed it by reformatting the drive somehow apparently with Linux. Don't ask me how.


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## Black (Dec 13, 2007)

slandimac i have a question.

Taking your advice on how to install (because i will within a week, just waiting for my backup hard drive), i want to partition 80GB of my total 320Gb because i will be using that big chunk for gaming and gaming smoothness. You said it recommends 32Gb partition size, does that mean making it bigger like 80GB is unsafe and therefore i shouldn't do it? *What do you recommend if i need a big partition?*


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## neufelni (Sep 17, 2007)

Black said:


> slandimac i have a question.
> 
> Taking your advice on how to install (because i will within a week, just waiting for my backup hard drive), i want to partition 80GB of my total 320Gb because i will be using that big chunk for gaming and gaming smoothness. You said it recommends 32Gb partition size, does that mean making it bigger like 80GB is unsafe and therefore i shouldn't do it? *What do you recommend if i need a big partition?*


I think that the reason it recommends 32 GB is because that is the largest size supported by the FAT32 filesystem, which OS X can read and write, but any higher than that you will have to use NTFS, which OS X can only read from. So there should be no problem creating a partition bigger than 32GB (mine is about 60), you just won't be able to write to your Windows partition from OS X.


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## Jarooda (Jul 18, 2006)

I just installed Vista through boot camp two days ago and I chose a 97GB partition.

Other than the fact that Apple provides 6 month old drivers on their Leopard Install disc, everything was silky smooth (after the 1 hour and a half installation and driver search


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## Black (Dec 13, 2007)

neufelni said:


> I think that the reason it recommends 32 GB is because that is the largest size supported by the FAT32 filesystem, which OS X can read and write, but any higher than that you will have to use NTFS, which OS X can only read from. So there should be no problem creating a partition bigger than 32GB (mine is about 60), you just won't be able to write to your Windows partition from OS X.


I'm still learning so bear with me. Could you explain what writing to windows partition from os x means?


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## slandimac (Jan 9, 2008)

Hello everyone,

Alright Black you had a few good questions there. Let's see if I can clarify some and hopefully others in the forum can chime in and correct and/or add on to what I'm writing.

Basically partitions on a hard drive are like rooms in a house in which a different operating system can operate. In the case of Macs with the Intel chip, it is now possible to run both OS X and also Microsoft's Windows XP/Vista. One method to do this is to electronically split the hard drive into two virtual hard drives by using what is called partitioning. Basically all it is are special entries made on a very special track on the hard drive called the partition table. It basically tells the hard drive what "rooms" are on the hard drive and what the format of those rooms looks like. The various formats are what the operating systems require the hard drive partitions to look like from the point of view of signals on the disk. There are different types of formats like HFS (used by OS X) NTFS (used by XP) FAT32 (used by DOS, Win, 2000 and XP) and so forth. I hope that helps a bit.

Now to answer your first question about sizing from what I've read of the replies on this thread I think I may have come up with a possible scenario of what happened to my friend's computer. I distinctly remember reading that if you want the OS X partition to read and write files over to the Windows partitions it must be formatted in FAT32. This is what I originallly configured in Boot Camp, but thinking back when the system restarted and was setting up the partitions for XP it was only giving me the option to format an NTFS partition and even at that, it was the aforementioned 133 GB size and NOT the 15 GB that we had originally asked for. I'm wondering if for some reason boot camp had not somehow actually created a FAT32 partition and for some reason when windows started installing it just, using a very technical term, crapped out! In your case if you want to create a larger partition than 32 Gb then you will have to use NTFS as the format. In this scenario your OS X partition will not 'see' the files in the XP NTFS partition, but you could always use an external drive formatted in FAT32 to do the file transfers which can be seen by both OSes.

In any event, I'm really beginning to think that it was definitely something I did wrong during the boot camp install that somehow fried the partition table and then to top it all off I aborted the XP install, something even the Apple genius told me, should never be done. Since this is my friend's computer and he's now a little apprehensive of Macs in general I'm not going to press the issue, however having said that I'm planning on buying a Mac mini in the next 6-10 months and when I do I will definitely try installing XP again with boot camp and if I feel really brave I may even attempt to abort the install and figure out exactly what happened. I'm just a curious animal that way.

I just hope I haven't confused you Black and as I will always write in my posts, if anyone has any opinions or criticism about what I've written by all means please do let me know as I consider myself a very knowledgeable technological individual, but I'm by no means a complete expert.

thanks again,

Stefano


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## TommyMacMini (Sep 24, 2008)

*Aborted Boot Camp Install*

I got in the same pickle with my Mac Mini(made too big a partition and then cancelled wit F3 to go back and make a smaller one, but OSX didn't boot), but I held down the power button until it shut down. The I held the option key down and then pushed the power button. Miraculously I got a screen that offered the various bootable systems. I clicked on the OSX and it restarted. Then I ran BootCamp Assistant again and deleted the 40GB part, ran it AGAIN and made a 32 gig and now I'll finish the install of XP (no vista please...)
Tommy MacMini


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## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

I installed XP Pro using Boot Camp on my 2.2 Ghz MBP in November of 07 when I got it and used a 20 G partition.

At the same time on the same day, I installed Parallels, using the very same copy of XP Pro.

I could then, and can now, either boot into full XP via the option key, or launch XP Pro via Parallels, depending on the task at hand.

Both systems have worked flawlessly for over 10 months and no issues at all with partition size is evident.

Here is a screen shot showing the Parallels version of Windows open and you can clearly see the Macintosh HD in the upper right. Below it is the XP PRO HD, below that the .Mac symbol and then the [C] Microsoft Windows XP Parallels HD.


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## Brianl (Apr 6, 2008)

*Wrong Partition*

I ran into the same problem. After going through the process of re-installing Leopard, then doing the Boot Camp thing again, I ended up with the same result again. After :clap: the problem with my Brother, he suggested that in fact I wasn't using a copy of Windows with the Service Pack embedded. After 3 tries, I decided to go once more, but this time using Windows with Service Pack embedded, the install went perfect. My advice, is to make sure that you have a copy of Windows with the Service Pack embedded.

Just a footnote to this, I only did this as an experiment, as I really don't want Windows on my mac. ( I have a Sony for that.)


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## Bjornbro (Feb 19, 2000)

For what it's worth... 24"/3.06GHz iMac w/80GB partition on a 1TB hard drive. Leopard runs perfect... and Vista Business (gasp) works perfect! As long as my wife just uses Microslop's operating system to run AutoCAD/Revit everything will be fine (I hope).


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## bgw (Jan 8, 2008)

If you want to save some money running Windows on on your Mac give Sun's VirtualBox a try. It will handle Windows and a number of other OS's.


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