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unable to install win xp on imac i7

S

Sfondry

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 29, 2010
10
0
I received my new imac 2 days ago and i have been throughly enjoying the machine untill today. Photoshop, illustrator, lightroom and all the other mac applications installed and run like a charm.
Yesterday instead i tried to install windows XP SP3 on the imac because i need to XP to run autoCAD and office. Although i followed the steps suggested by BootCamp assistant, i was never able to finish the installation process:
1-once the imac reboots the windows installatios starts
2-I choose the partition of the disck on which i want to instal the OS
3-The installation starts, files are copied and expanded
4-The installation process ends and a blue screen with the words "restarting computer" appears\
5-Imac freezes on this screen... It doesn't reboot or anything and if i hold the power button down and then restart the machine i have to repeat the whole process!!!


What am i doing wrong?? Are there other ways to install XP on the imac? am i missing certain drivers"??
 
Yeah, I've had this too. All I did was hold down the power button, restart the machine, hold down the alt key to select the boot disk, choose bootcamp and everything proceeded as normal. I've had no problems since so try this and see what happens.
 
updating the iMac especially bootcamp might help , but there might be some minor problems left ....just do the same thing at a mates i7 and it is not that easy to get xp running i got it installed but ...the xp on my emac running virtual pc outperforms it for whatever reason in terms of graphics abilities and speed ...did not even try to play a game as it might blow the whole thing up ....
but i dont give up yet ,apple says the imac can run xp under bootcamp , so there must be a way that its running half way proper , we gave already up the dream of it ever running at i7 speeds

my mate is furious already about it, as he tried it for over a week to get xp running ,without any results and makes me responsible ,because i told him how great mac's are , and now its up to me to proof that by getting xp running at full speed , because i told him bootcamp is not a emulator and windows will run on it like on a similar pc :confused:

but for the moment its running at about the speed of a 500mhz pentium 2 with a 8mb graphic card

maybe i start from scratch , because its a dead end at the moment
 
Rodus said:
Yeah, I've had this too. All I did was hold down the power button, restart the machine, hold down the alt key to select the boot disk, choose bootcamp and everything proceeded as normal. I've had no problems since so try this and see what happens.
Click to expand...


I tried doing as you said, but after selecting the windows disk a black screen appears saying "disk error, hold down any key to restart"

I already removed the faulty partition and repeated the whole process with bootcamp and got the same results......

Is there another way to load it? do i have to dowload certain drives?

This is really slowing me down....:rolleyes:
 
A temporary fix would be to get a VM environment and install Windows XP to that & use it until the BootCamp issue you're experiencing is resolved.
 
MacHamster68 said:
updating the iMac especially bootcamp might help , but there might be some minor problems left ....just do the same thing at a mates i7 and it is not that easy to get xp running i got it installed but ...the xp on my emac running virtual pc outperforms it for whatever reason in terms of graphics abilities and speed ...did not even try to play a game as it might blow the whole thing up ....
but i dont give up yet ,apple says the imac can run xp under bootcamp , so there must be a way that its running half way proper , we gave already up the dream of it ever running at i7 speeds

my mate is furious already about it, as he tried it for over a week to get xp running ,without any results and makes me responsible ,because i told him how great mac's are , and now its up to me to proof that by getting xp running at full speed , because i told him bootcamp is not a emulator and windows will run on it like on a similar pc :confused:

but for the moment its running at about the speed of a 500mhz pentium 2 with a 8mb graphic card

maybe i start from scratch , because its a dead end at the moment
Click to expand...

I'm sorry but XP on virtualPC is slower than running it on a Pentium 90. I refuse to believe it's quite that slow.
 
When you ran through boot camp it would ask you what to format the PC partition as (FAT 32 or NTFS), but you also have to do this again in the Windows install setup, try NTFS here and see if that works.
 
cjmillsnun said:
I'm sorry but XP on virtualPC is slower than running it on a Pentium 90. I refuse to believe it's quite that slow.
Click to expand...

xp on virtual pc is far from slow if you got enough ram for it left over , ok if you run it at minimum ram then of course its slow

but i solved the problem on the i7 now
 
problem solved format complete drive reset pram, install snow leo, bootcamp ,update firmware, bootcamp and osx , install xp and its running quiet reasonable ,
ok slower then expected from a i7 ,
but fast enough to do some gaming at lower graphic settings
(battlefield 2142)
but maybe my expectations had been a bit to high
after i had build a gaming rig with a i7 extreme and dual sli graphic setup everything seems to be a bit slow on the gaming side of things
 
ok i solved the problem: i borrowed one of my friend's copy of VMWare fusion, installed the software and then created a virtual machine with xp sp 3 running within osx.

Worked like a charm and the whole process took less than 20 minutes.:D:D

For now i set the virtual machine to run on one single core and 500mb of ram, but as soon as i upgrade the i7 to 8gb of ram i will dedicate 2 gb to xp.
2gb of ram will be more than enough to run draft in AutoCAD and type documents in MS word!!.

Thanks for the help
 
I'm glad solved here. In case others are still having issues I'm just posting that none of the above worked for me. I had to do the USB dongle trick from apple... just search their support forums. Basically reformat a USB stick and load two files on it. It stops the Black Screen O Death problem. I still had one hang for a long time and got a blue screen of death. Then manually restarted computer and it went to the drivers and everything's peachy...

Now if only the morons at steam would let me purchase something while sitting in Singapore with a US account... idiots.

Paul
 
MacHamster68 said:
xp on virtual pc is far from slow if you got enough ram for it left over.
but i solved the problem on the i7 now
Click to expand...

Not true at all,
I had the fastest Power PC Apple ever made (Quad G5) with 8GB RAM running Virtual PC 7.02 and it was dreadfully slow and useless for all but the most lightweight of tasks.
An Intel based VM solution is in a different league all together in performance and is MUCH quicker than its Power PC Counterpart and far more useful as a result. :)
 
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