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atlanticza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 18, 2008
563
2
Cape Town
My nephew was trying to install XP on his new Macbook but chose the wrong partition. (He's not one known for reading guides and ignored "Do not select “Leave the current file system intact.” To successfully install Windows XP, you must select one of the other options.") And eventually the screen displayed "Disk Error"

Of course, he can't eject the XP disk (but can power down). But on power up, his Macbook boots from the CD and tries to install XP again.

I've searched high and low for a definitive solution. Any bright sparks here or misfortunates who have experienced this problem? Help would be most appreciated.

Fixed it! Simple, hold down the Option key when rebooting and choose the Mac HD option - delete partition using Boot Camp app again, and start again, this time reading the Boot Camp guide!
 
Last edited:
Fixed it! Simple, hold down the Option key when rebooting and choose the Mac HD option - delete partition using Boot Camp app again, and start again, this time reading the Boot Camp guide!

Glad you solved it! Your thread title had me worried that your nephew had deleted the OS X partition. :p

B
 
For the future ... I believe if you hold down the mouse button while booting, it will eject the optical disk from the drive.

-howard
 
Uh oh.... I am having a similar problem, but when I hold down option at start up my only two options are: Windows HD or Windows CD. .... have I written over my Mac OS X??

When I chose a partition to install Windows to it only gave me one option, and it had a much larger capacity (130 GB) than the Windows partition I created in boot camp (6 GB), but I went ahead with it since it was the only partition that it showed. Now I'm stuck in a loop of installing Windows over and over, but it never opens, and I am concerned that I may have written over the Mac OS.

Any ideas for me??
 
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