Got the Boot Camp Blues. Can someone help?

[johnnyICON]

Hi all,

I own a Mac Pro (Early 2008) and decided to give Boot Camp a try, so i bought myself a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Hard Drive. Anyway, ran through the Boot Camp Assistant and followed the instructions to a 'T', but I am having no luck.

I first ran into the common problem with Windows Vista Installer complaining about "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation". So I found this thread and tried the proposed fix to no avail. I later found this approach on a Window forum as alternative method for formatting my Windows partition. Again, to no avail -- the installer spewed out the same garbage as before.

So, at my wits end, I decided to forget using Vista and trying using XP instead, BUT for whatever reason, my mac keeps ejecting the CD when it boots. You can imagine my frustration.

So I have two things I'm hoping someone could tell me.

1) The most obvious: Has anyone experienced the same issues as I have? If so, were you able to resolve it?

2) How the hell do your force my mac to boot from a friggin' CD? I've read all sorts of junk on the internet like holding down 'c' or 'Option' or some crazy combination of CMD SHIFT ALT DELETE, none of which worked. I'm a bit surprised that Apple has no documentation on this either. Anyway, if anyone knows how, please let me know!

I'd really appreciate the help. I've wasted closed to 3 hours now messing around with Boot Camp and Windows installer. I'd really like to put this puppy to rest.

Thanks in advance!

 

[RedRaven571]

Since I just got my first iMac over the weekend, I'm far from an expert but are you trying to install Windows on an external drive? If you are using the WD drive as your internal drive, did Leopard install OK? When I was researching a new HDD for my PC laptop, I saw a lot of posts by Macbook users indicating they were having problems installing the Mac OS on the Hitachi Travelstar I eventually bought; it seemed like it was an issue specifically with Macs.

I installed XP SP2 on a newly created partition on the internal drive that came with my iMac by following the boot camp instructions and it went very smoothly.

 

[Consultant]

Perhaps You should remove all drives and have only the drive you are trying to install windows on it in the machine?

1. no issue. Very easy.

2. Boot from cd, hold OPTION to choose which bootable disk you want to boot from. Hold C also works. If those don't work you don't have a working disk.

Bootcamp is very easy if you follow directions. Note you should format windows partition to NTFS when you boot up with the win installer.