Bootcamp windows XP

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(Just relised this is in the wrong section, i do appoligize and i will be more careful in future)

Hi guys and gals,

I'm not sure if this is the correct forum for this, but i will ask here anyway and hopefully a moderator can correct my mistake.


I have an iMac from september 08 and i am running snow leopard and it is completely up to date. Before i updated to snow leopard i had windows xp running in bootcamp without a single problem, it was great (well not great, i mean it is windows). Then i decided i didn't need it anymore so i deleted the partition (that was before sno leopard), now i have snow leopard installed and i am trying to install xp again mainly to play a game Spinter Cell Conviction. The game clearly states on the back that it is compatible with the nVidia GeForce 8800 GS which my iMac has.

So here is the thing, i install windows and everything seems fine, i put the snow leopard cd in to install the drivers via bootcamp 3.0 and then the graphics card seems to stuff up a bit as though the drivers are wrong, i mean the screen will randomly go white, sometimes grey, and once it even went bright pink. Im not sure why it does this. so i decided to format again and reinstall windows xp this time i used my oringinal leopard CD for the drivers and that didn't seem to work either, so then i formatted for a third time and this time i used the snow leopard cd again and then when it rebooted the screen was black but i could still hear the windows start up sound in the back ground, i then booted in safe mode and updated to bootcamp 3.1 which seemed to give me the right drivers, but then after a short while the screen would go a colour again. I tried to update via nvidia website but those drivers can't detect the macs video card.

So 48hrs later i am installing windows again this time i have a USB drive with bootcamp 3.1 for windows and the latest nvidia drivers for my card.

Can anyone see anything i am doing wrong? or do i need to give you more info.

Does anyone have a solution, i am ready to pull my hair out, i just don't get it.

Edit - Just finished installing windows xp, tried to install bootcamp 3.1 from usb drive and it said it needed 3.0 installed first, so i installeed it off the snow leopard cd and restard the computer, which gave me a black screen and it appears windows is running behind the black screen because i still hear the start up sound. Forced a shutdown and it started up agaain with another black screen this time no sound.
 

chscag

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Note: Moved to more appropriate forum.
 

chscag

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Let's try this:

Boot the machine with your Snow Leopard DVD. Run Disk Utility from the top menu Utilities. Run the verify and repair routine from First Aid to see if there are any disk errors. Make sure you run it on both volumes. You also might want to run the Apple Hardware Test although I'm not sure that will really highlight any possible graphic hardware errors.

The "black" screen error you're encountering is probably related to a graphics problem that Windows is having. If an improper driver is being loaded, you'll get the black screen. I suspect that's what is happening since you say you can hear Windows running in the background.

You state that you also used safe mode... Did you install the proper drivers from safe mode? Safe mode startup bypasses all drivers and loads the Windows generic drivers which will amount to a plain VGA screen with very poor resolution.

Let us know.

Regards.
 
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Thank you Chscag for moving this post to the appropriate folder.

Also thank you for your suggestions and response. I managed to fix the problem at about 6am this morning after having stayed up all night trying to fix the problem, I'm still not sure exactly why i had the problem but it was definately a video driver problem.

The way i fixed it was to format again for the umpteenth time, once it was all done i inserted the snow leopard disk and installed 3.0 of boot camp, for whatever reason it fully installed, where in previous attempts, it would lockup during the screen flashing caused by the video driver being installed, so at first i was happy that it had all worked o.k, then upon reboot i had the same problem with the screen being black and being able to hear windows chimes in the background, ready to pull my hair out i rebooted again this time in safe mode, and uninstalled the video driver that the snow leopard disk had installed, and rebooted the computer again and it booted into windows xp again this time i was able to see the desktop, so i went to hardware manager and selected the video card and chose update drivers, i then allowed it to connect to the internet to find drivers, and removed the snow leopard disk from the drive and click o.k, a couple or minutes later the screen flashed again then it stabilized, i then updated windows and installed my game and now everything is working fine. I did NOT update bootcamp to 3.1 because from what i have read it is mainly for mac books and windows 7

The funny thing is i am sure i had done the exact same thing a couple of times before but this time it seems to have stuck, which is great.


Thanks again for taking the time to try to help me.


P.S During all this i had rang apple care and they also told me to run the Apple Hardware Test, he told me to loop it and let it run while i was sleeping so i did so and i woke to it being frozen. So they are sending someone out to look at it.

Also when originally trying to partition the drive for windows in boot camp assistant, it would not do it, so i run the disk utility and it found and fixed errors, and since then i have noticed a folder in my root directory called lost+found, is this important? or can i just delete it and assume it was file it didn't know what to do with while disk utility was fixing the errors. inside the lost+found folder it created are empty folder titled with seemingly random numbers like 223348585
 

chscag

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Also when originally trying to partition the drive for windows in boot camp assistant, it would not do it, so i run the disk utility and it found and fixed errors, and since then i have noticed a folder in my root directory called lost+found, is this important? or can i just delete it and assume it was file it didn't know what to do with while disk utility was fixing the errors. inside the lost+found folder it created are empty folder titled with seemingly random numbers like 223348585

I'm glad to hear you're up and running. Looks like you may have lost some sleep doing it though. :)

As far as the lost + found folder is concerned, if there's nothing in it that you wish to retain, just delete it. I still don't understand why the video driver set that was included with Snow Leopard did not work correctly. It certainly should have.

I ran into a bit of a problem myself 18 months ago when I first installed XP Home via Boot Camp. The original Intel provided drivers on the Leopard DVD did not correctly set resolution and color depth for my external monitor. But a quick trip to the Intel driver site and download resolved that.

Let us know if we can be of more help.

Regards.
 

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