please help screwed up bootcamp install

somehow i screwed up my bootcamp install. when i boot the computer it says disk error press any key to continue. pressing keys does nothing. so i put in the macosx disc figuring forget it then. i will lose everything. same thing. it doesnt even see the disc in the cd rom drive. disk error. press any key to continue. ***.

so now i cant do anything at all? what do i do. i should have never bothered with boot camp. now my computer is screwed.

woohoo. held down the option key and was able to get back to osx. still dont know how i messed up my xp install though.

what i did was start bootcamp. i choose 32 meg partition for xp. it made the partition. it said insert xp disk. i did. xp started. asked me where to install. i choose 32 meg bootcamp partition. ask me if i wanted to format or leave it as it is. i said leave it as it is. install started and finished. soon as it reboot. boot disk error. hit any key to continue.

was i suppose to format the xp partition? i thought i was supposed to leave t as is.

did you make sure you formatted the disk when running the xp setup

follow the bootcamp instructions word by word

haha, yeah, i was about to suggest that... i'm not sure how you messed it up either but delete the partition you put it on and retry! That is not normal so don't be discouraged.

i dont have a printer. is there any place i can read or download the directions online? or is the file somewhere on disk i can read. i cant find it.

a few posts above showed me how to delete the partition so i figured that part out. the bootcamp partition is gone and i recovered the space. it was scary but its done.

for a short time there i was really crapping my pants.

This should help you.

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Boot_Camp_Install-Setup.pdf

thanks it was very helpful. i see what i did wrong now. i chose leave file system intact when the directions tell you absolutly not to because even though bootcamp partitions this space it cant boot from it. so you have to format it through the xp setup.