Error installing windows xp

Hi guys,

I just bought my macbook pro yesterday and I tried to install windows xp via bootcamp and after the installing it says "setup is starting windows" and then an error saying "session3_initialization_failed" came out.

I downloaded windows xp sp3 from my university and burn it into a disk.

Can anybody tell me what's going on or what did i do wrong?

Thanks

This error refers to a missing critical file. This is the only thing i can find on it but it refers to an already installed operating system.

I did some looking on the internet and many other people with this problem have found that their CD-Drive was faulty. LINK

hope this helps

erm, how do I check if my cd drive is faulty?

My guess would be either a bad download or a bad burn - probably the download.
Did you verify the checksum of the downloaded file prior to burning?

It is not uncommon when downloading such a large file for there to be minor errors; which can corrupt the operating system install process from a .ISO disk. I agree this is probably the result of something like that. I had something similar happen to me when I downloaded Ubuntu the first time; I had to redo it and it turned out fine.

It works now after redownloading it! Thanks alot guys!

Errors installing WinXP on my Macbook Pro

Greetings Appelonians
I am privileged to have attained a brand new Macbook Pro 2010. I am not completely new to Apple and have used 'boot camp' on my other iMac's have have owned previously. In the process of installing WinXP on the new Macbook Pro, I came upon a few challenging errors, some I have solved, but others getting the best of me. I am going to run through my situation I am at the moment, starting with my initial challenge, the solutions I came up with and at last the current cul de sac.

The family of errors all evolved with me trying to install WinXP on my Macbook Pro

A) WinXP on my Macbook Pro
1) I used Boot Camp to create a 50gb partition for WinXP.
2) I booted up with the WinXP Install CD (original)
3) Deleted the Boot Camp Partition, recreating it and formatted it as NTFS.
4) Rebooted and got my first error after choosing to have the Macbook reboot with the newly installed WinXP partition.

Error
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<windows_root>\System32\hal.dll
Please re-install a copy of the above file.
windows_root\System32\hal.dll missing or corrupt:
Please re-install a copy of the above file.
Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

Error Fix
1) I used a Bootdisk created by BartPE and changed a line in the Boot.ini file. Apparently this issue is due to the fact that the Macbook Pro has a 200Mb partition, the Boot.ini refers incorrectly to the wrong partition when trying to complete the WinXP installation after rebooting.
2) I changed the line in the Boot.ini that refers to the partition as 3 to 2 (see bold below):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Click to expand...

3) This fixed the issue and Windows started after the reboot, remember still that my WinXP installation is incompete.

B) Blue Screen of Death
1) During the WinXP run screen, my second error popped up as one of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, as found at the mentioned link.
2) It seems that this error is caused by a problem with an IDE cable or the BIOS in which case you just replace the cable or reload the fail-safe default settings in the BIOS. However, most of the time this error is caused by some sort of problem with the volume.
3) I booted again with my boot disk and ran 'chkdsk -r' and there after 'fixboot' to fix any errors regarding the volume of the HDD. (Fix can be found at the above mentioned 'Blue Screen of Death' link.)
4) Now I know that Mac does not use a BIOS but a EFI and this is where I am stuck.

All I need is to get WinXP installed properly on my New Macbook Pro. I had no trouble installing WinXP on my other iMacs and this has been the first time I had this issue. I do own a copy of Parallels, but I would like to run WinXP on a seperate partition with the option of either booting up with WinXP as well as using WinXP as Virtual Machine in Snow Leopard.

Hope some one out there can assist me, please.