Windows will be the death of me.

[Stinky The Clown]

We have a new arrival ..... a brand spanking new MacBook. Nothing high end. Just one step above the bottom of of the new aluminum case jobbies. Two of us will share it.

Tonight I bought Fusion (see my "Parallels 4.0 is Dangerous" thread, elsewhere) and intended to load it, put a copy of WinXP on it, load on two basic Win programs I need, and call it a night.

I should be so lucky.

I tried to install Win in Boot Camp. I did this before, on my Mac Pro, and it worked fine: I connected an external USB CD/DVD drive and put my Win98 disk in it. I put my WinXP/SP2 *upgrade* disk in the Mac's drive. I know this isn't supposed to be possible, but it HAS worked for me already. The idea is to allow the install to see the XP disk and the "qualifying product" to legitimize the upgrade disk. I then started Bootcamp Assistant. All got recognized and things progressed to the first Windows restart.

Nope. Not happening. Upon restart, I got a "disk error, press any key to retry" message. No way to get it to continue.

I did this several times. Each time I got the same error. I then tried to boot from the Win CD, but that started the install all over again. I wound up removing the BootCamp partition a few times and redoing the whole process. No luck.

So I figure I'll try an install direct into Fusions and skip Bootcamp (maybe better cuz it can get by with less hard drive space).

I get part way through and then, after the validation, the Fusion window (the virtual machine) fails to see the Mac's CD drive and it won't restart the process.

I do ***this*** a half dozen times.

Nada.

Do I need to just bite the bullet and buy a full version of Windows? I can't imagine that will help, though. My unorthodox setup worked before on my MacPro. And my spiffy new laptop sees the external drive just fine, thankyewverymuch.

It is now midnight and I'm beat.

I'm open to any suggestions ....

[av8rdave]

1. My understanding is that you need a full version of windows that is on a single disc

I'm using Boot Camp with no problems. I found a full version of XP (SP2 - you can get the free update to SP3 online once you've installed) at Tiger Direct for about $90. More than I wanted to spend, but it was a full version on a single disc and worked great.

Good luck!

[Stinky The Clown]

2. The problem, it turns out ......

..... was **ME**

I was a dunderhead and failed to follow the directions when installing. I did not format the Boot Camp partition correctly and as a result Windows would not install. I deleted the partition, started over, this time reading the instructions (duh), and it all worked perfectly.

By the way, my two-CD method works perfectly. That was not the issue at all. And it isn't that the Mac won't accept an upgrade copy. It really doesn't care. The issue is that, while Windows is installing, you have no way to eject the WinXP install CD to put in the Win98 CD that verifies your right to use the upgrade disk. This is because of the SuperDrives that Apple uses; they have no external eject button. They only use the software implementation, and with no drivers installed, they don't eject. By hooking up the external CD drive, there is no need to worry about that. The Mac, at the machine level, sees both drives and Windows, even before drivers are installed, sees them both, too. Honest, it works perfectly.

[av8rdave]

3. That's good to know...

The Apple .pdf file about boot camp (for Leopard) implied a one disk only procedure, but I may have misinterpreted. I'm relatively new to the Mac world, so I still have a lot to learn.

As I understand it then, the number of disks is irrelevant, as long as there is some combination that shows you at some point in time as being a licensed Windows user. Do I have that right?

I am ALMOST Microsoft free (other than one lousy little application that's Windows-only that I need for work - hence an entire partition and Boot Camp that would be otherwise unnecessary). I look forward to an eventual Microsoft/Windows - free computing experience.

Glad you got things up and running the way you want them!

[Stinky The Clown]

4. Well, sorta ......

Yes, the issue is that the upgrade CD needs a copy of the previous version to allow use of the upgrade. If you do not have the qualifying product installed, it looks for the original install media, hence the need for that second (Win98) CD.

On the Mac side, the drives Mac uses will not eject while Windows is installing. That's where the second drive comes in. The install disk in one and the qualifying product in the other.

Works like a charm.