Issues installing windows using NTFS

[adtgreat]

Hello, I have a MBP 2.2 and I am currently trying to install windows xp pro on it. Using boot camp the whole way I run into no problems until the laptop restarts after the initial install. It will show the loading windows screen with the progress bar moving and it will just freeze. Seems to freeze at the same spot every time too. I can access windows in safe mode and i installed my chipset driver from the leopard disc manually to see if that would resolve anything and it did not.

When I format the drive in fat32 everything works fine. I can get into windows, load drivers, and it has no problem loading after restarts. It seems to only have problems when I format in ntfs.

I have completely formatted my laptop including the mac partition, reset pram, tried multiple oem windows cds, and as of right now I am trying to install vista (bleh) on it. Which also seems to be having it's fair share of issues. It took about 20 minutes to bring up the welcome screen that prompts me to do the initial install and now the screen after that is taking about 10/15 minutes.

I am almost out of ideas here, is it possible that something could be wrong with the HDD? I have ran multiple hardware tests like pc check and dtf and those all pass. Is there something I can do in safe mode when I format in ntfs to get it to boot normally? Or am i just missing something completely?

Thanks!

 

[adtgreat]

Well, seems like I discovered some things out of sheer desperation trying to get this thing to work. I do not believe the issue has to do with the type of formatting the drive is in. I ended up replacing the hdd, the hdd cable, and the optical drive.

Something I noticed was that any time I have any cd in the drive when I try to boot into the windows partition it will freeze during the loading screen. When I took out the cd it booted into windows fine but would not recognize the optical drive(even my replacement one.) So I obviously couldn't install drivers using my leopard disc. I transferred the files from the leopard disc onto a flash drive and installed them on the Mac in windows. Everything seemed fine during the installation but when I restarted the laptop it froze during boot up (even without a cd in it) I'm obviously thinking the problem has to do with the optical drive or some type of conflicting driver/software.

I'm relatively new to mac software (I know the hardware, I take them apart all the time) but is there something beyond the 10.5.4 update I should be doing? I see there is a specific firmware update that includes some compatibility fixes for boot camp but I am just not sure if that will help. I’ve done a little bit of searching and haven’t run across this problem in particular. So I may just have an odd ball mac.

 

[mrplow]

You seem to have been through pretty much all the troubleshooting that can be done! The only suggestion I'd make is to get the latest bootcamp update. It's an update for the Windows side of things rather than Mac. It adds support for XPSP3 and a few bug fixes etc.

 

[adtgreat]

Fixed it! All I had to do was disable the optical drive in safe mode and it seems to be working fine now. So I pretty much replaced all that hardware for nothing! ;p