08-27-2011, 01:09 PM

I am trying desperately to get onto Windows XP Professional using Bootcamp. I've got the entire thing installed now onto the BOOTCAMP harddrive that I partitioned with the Bootcamp Assistant app. When I try to start it up (holding the option key down during start-up) it gives me a message along the lines of "Disc Error, press any key to restart"..

I've somehow come to the conclusion that it's because of the way my BOOTCAMP drive is formatted. The drive is 62gb big but is in FAT format, and I'm guessing it needs to be in NFTS format. I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to reformat it. I've tried restarting the whole process twice. When I get to the window during the Windows set-up asking me to reformat my drive, I always select "Convert drive to NTFS". Now for some ridiculous reason it doesn't convert it to NTFS, it converts it to FAT, which I believe is the reason why it's returning that same error message every time I try to boot it up..

If anybody has any ideas or could at least explain to me what is going on it would be very much appreciated, thankyou!

08-27-2011, 03:36 PM

You've done something wrong because the Boot Camp assistant will not create a partition that is 32 GB or larger using a file format other than NTFS. Also, the Windows installer will refuse to format a partition to FAT-32 that is 32 GB or larger. Only Disk Utility will format a partition larger than 32 GB to FAT-32.

Use the BC assistant from OS X to remove the partition and start over. Print out the BC assistant instructions first before attempting the installation of Windows again.