Re-installing XP on macbook pro with three partitions

[Ironflamingo]

Hi,

I have a 2.8 ghz 15" MBP bought in August 2009 that I have created three partitions on. One partition is the Macintosh HD partition, the second is a NTFS Windows partition that is 30 gigs and only has Windows XP and drivers, and the third is a "data" partition in NTFS that I keep all my music/pictures/games/homework on.

I got a virus while running Windows XP SP2 (surprise) and couldn't clean it so I decided to reformat that partition and install a fresh copy of Windows XP. When I boot from my XP disk I can reformat the drive and get to the "Setup is copying files" part of the installer but once the installer restarts it won't continue. It will ask me to press any key to boot from a CD and not go any farther. If I hold option and try and boot from the partition where I was installing Windows I get a black screen with a single underscore type blinking cursor.

Does anyone know how to resolve this problem without reformatting my "data" partition or point me to somewhere where my question has been resolved?

Thanks

 

[Quad5Ny]

Try using the boot camp assistant to delete the windows partition and then go through the setup again. Make sure you don't delete your backup partition by mistake! =P

 

[balamw]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

Try using the boot camp assistant to delete the windows partition and then go through the setup again. Make sure you don't delete your backup partition by mistake! =P

That won't work because BCA expects either a single HFS partition or 1 HFS and 1 NTFS/FAT partition.

Once you get it fixed use Winclone to be able to restore your apps partition quickly.

For now, try to find the thread on blank screen blinking cursor and try some of those fixes. First try to zap PRAM.

B