Help :) Installing windows OS

Ok, I feel like I'm missing some information. You removed the BOOTCAMP partition in what way? Did you delete the partition in Disk Utility or with Bootcamp Assistant?

Either way, you can go into Disk Utility and click on the HD (it's usually the top most item in the left hand sidebar with the size of the drive first) then click on the "Partition" pane in the main window. What do you see here? Two partitions? A single partition with grey space above or below it?

 

When you say "restore" do you mean to say that you booted into the recovery partition, ran Disk Utility to partition the drive to a single (visible) partition, format that partition as Mac OS Extended, and then reinstall Lion on a clean hard drive. Then after the reinstallation you "restored" from Time Machine?

Either way, what are ALL of the partitions called?

I'm going to go ahead and give you the long solution ahead of time, but get back to me before doing this:

1. delete any previous Bootcamp partitions and resize the Mac OS partition in Disk Utility so that it fills the drive completely.

2. make sure you have a Windows 7 DVD (either a retail disc or a legal downloaded image file from Microsoft burned to DVD)

3. launch Bootcamp Assistant and resize the drive, and install Windows 7 by following the steps

When you go to boot into Win7 or Lion just hold down the "Option/Alt" key before the startup chime and hold it until the drive icons show up and pick which one you want to boot into (if you need to use windows click the appropriate icon and the arrow beneath it, or the same for Lion)

 

Ok, was this a retail disc for Win7 or did you burn it by buying a downloadable version? If it was retail check the data side of the disc for scratches, if it was a burned disc try burning a new one and trying again.

Edit: When burning use the slowest speed and allow the disc to be verified for best results.

 

How long do you wait after rebooting into the installation? Does the disc spin up in the drive or does it just go straight to the black screen with the underscore on it and do NOTHING at all?

Edit: Check this out also http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3173

 

Some folks just have to wait a bit longer than normal....give it about 10 minutes and see if it eventually boots into the installation...if it just sits there and my edited solution doesn't work for you then I'm at a loss for solutions.

 

Hold on, you can't boot into ANY OS?

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Ok, walk me through this.

With NOTHING plugged into the laptop or any discs in the optical drive and the power OFF, press the power button. What comes up?

 

Go here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848 and download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant via the link at the bottom of the page. Then follow the page's instructions to create an external recovery disk

When you boot into the external recovery disk I need you to open Disk Utility. Click on the primary internal hard drive (usually at the top of the sidebar) and click on "Repair Disk" in the main window. This will check a lot of things like the catalog file and GUID Partition table and will fix it if it can. It's best to use the external for this so we are not using the internal hard drive at all during this process. It takes a long time to complete this process so just wait until it says that it has either fixed the problems that showed up or it says that everything is ok. After that run it a second time for safety. If no errors show up and all the results are green, then try the Bootcamp process over again.


If this doesn't work and this is a fresh installation, I'm just going to have to ask you to completely wipeout the entire drive and install Lion from the external recovery disk, completely remove ALL the partitions on the internal drive. I am at a loss for solutions as to what has gone wrong here if the scan doesn't find anything wrong.

 

p.s. if you use Adobe products from CS3 and prior (CS4 might do this as well) in Windows the problem might be caused by them. CS3 stores the serial numbers in the Master Boot Record (which is really stupid on their part) and this can muck up a multi-booting machine.

 

Boot into OS X, start bootcamp assistant. Wipe the Windows partition through the Bootcamp Assistant option, if it shows as it still being there.

Close BCA, then start it up again - this time choose to install Windows 7 and follow it's instructions. It should sort out the partition problems at least - don't touch Disk Utility.

 

Had this issue myself with CS4. Wound up forgetting the Bootcamp idea and set up a virtual machine for Windows instead. Much easier and I'm much happier. Best Windows machine I've ever owned is my Mac.

If you don't want to pay for VMware Fusion or Parallels, try Oracle's Virtual Box. It's free. You can download it at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.