[Sam_W]

I have a brand new 2.4 GHz Macbook running OSX 10.5.2. It's stock except for two things:

1> I originally had created two user accounts on the computer, but one has since been deleted, leaving only the admin account.

2> I installed 4GBs of Crucial 667 MHZ DDR2 SDRAM.

I am now attempting to install XP Pro via Boot Camp. The partition was created successfully, but when I click the Start Installation button in Boot Camp assistant, the following happens:

Macbook powers down
Macbook starts back up
Gray screen displays (no Apple log)
HD and Superdrive both start spinning up
The screen flashes blue for just a fraction of a second.
The screen goes black with just a flashing cursor visibile in the upper left corner.

The drives spin for a few seconds after that, but nothing else happens.

I have tried the following fixes:

Different media - two different XP Pro discs, both of which have been used for successful Boot Camp installs before, on different Macbooks.

I've also created images of the disks and burnt those using both the Superdrive and a windows box.

I checked the disk permissions, there were no errors. Figured I'd go ahead and do a repair anyway, but that didn't change anything.

Reset the PRAM, no joy.

Even did a check disk by starting in single user mode. Still no change.

I've searched but haven't seen this particular error anywhere. Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea what the problem could be?

[PB PM]

This isn't good news. Anytime I had problems like that with bootcamp the only solution was to reformat the bootcamp partition and start from scratch.

[Sam_W]

Gave that a try, no joy in Mudville. It's doubly frustrating because this worked without a hitch on another Macbook, albeit the one from the last revision rather than the most current one.

Is it possible that a reinstall of Leopard would help? And, if I were to reinstall Leopard, what are the best options for getting it as close to 'factory new' as possible?

[PB PM]

Sometimes I had to reformat the entire drive to get bootcamp to work again, it was a pain. That's why I took Windows off my Mac and put together a mid-range windows box.

[Sam_W]

Well, it's fixed. It wouldn't read the XP disk automatically, but if I rebooted and held down the option key I could select the disk as the boot drive.

Took me forever to figure it out, but there it is - simple fix, and i can now run the one program I need XP for.