"this disc does not contain a windows XP-compatible partition."

I have finally got through boot camp assistant far enough to see the beautiful blue screen that is windows XP setup. I have tried searching site:macrumor.com on google with no luck. I have also been referencing the boot camp official setup guide which hasnt helped.

When I select the the partition labeled "BOOTCAMP" it gives the the message I quoted in the topic title. Since none of this is covered in the guide and I havent been able to find any solutions, I'm not willing to screw around with it. What am I doing wrong?

My options are:

-Setup up Windows XP on the selected item
-Create a partition in unpartitioned space
-Delete the selected partition

guh.... okay this is going to take a while to explain but I'll try to be as clear and concise as possible.


-I have 4 internal HDDs, one of which is a SSD I boot from
-Today I did something stupid, which was trying to install OSX (so that I could run boot camp assistant from it) on my storage HDD without creating a separate partition for it.
-The installation continually hanged indefinitely at the "do you own another mac?" step.
-I talked to Apple support and realized I should have created a partition specifically for OSX and boot camp.

I went ahead and did this, and was unable to use boot camp assistant because when I selected the storage HDD for creating the windows partition, the continue button would be greyed out and the text in the bottom of the window would read "This disk is your Mac OS X startup disk and appears to have been partitioned by another utility"

This baffled the Apple Senior advisor I talked to, he decided to use the visual link via internet to walk me through creating a partition and installing OS X on it. When we encountered the same error, he had me take a data capture something or rather and a screen shot and send it to him so that he could forward it to engineers since he had no idea what could be preventing me from creating a windows partition on the drive.

The next thing we tried was wiping the drive entirely (I have time machine on a separate drive), and then creating a partition to install OS X. We did this, and when I ran boot camp assistant, it actually let me create a windows partition. I created the partition and selected "quit and install later"

Then I went ahead and tried to restore the remaining partition of the drive to my storage HDD via time machine, but time machine just said "there isnt enough space." Oh well, that's a separate issue.

I went back into boot camp assistant (booting from the partition I created specifically for installing boot camp) and selected to follow through with the installation, at which point I ran into the problem that this topic specifies.


NOW... when I go back to boot camp assistant, select "create or remove a windows partition" and highlight the storage HDD, it lists the drive name as the 3 different partitions separated by commas, and gives me the same "This disk is your Mac OS X starup disk and appears to have been partitioned by another utility" and I cant do anything.




What on earth is going on here?

Okay now when I select the partition it gives me the option of formatting it and doesnt tell me "this disk does not contain a windows XP compatible partition"

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