Upgrade from L to SL. Now only legit XP CD discs will boot.

[El Jefe]

I swear, I am losing my mind. Hopefully someone here can tell me if I am crazy or not.

 

I have a Macbook Pro 1,1 (original Intel Core Duo 2Ghz). I have been running Leopard for a while and have been running Bootcamp with a XP partition. I have done several installs, all have gone flawlessly..... until now.

 

I replaced my internal hard drive with a newer, larger drive and installed a clean 10.6. No problem.

I updated to 10.6.1. No problem

I installed iWork '09 and iLife '09 from DVD. No problem.

I ran Bootcamp, setup the partition, installed the Windows XP SP2 CDROM and started installation.... PROBLEM

 

After reboot, when the MBP first wakes up, the DVD spins up, reads for a few seconds and EJECTS! I retried with a few copies and slipstream discs that have worked fine in the past and they all eject. ALL EXCEPT my original Windows XP Pro CDROM disc from Microsoft. It works just fine.

 

The discs that are ejected by the MBP all work fine once the MBP is booted in OSX (can read directories). I can also boot those discs in other machines and install with no problem.

 

Its as if the latest MBP firmware has discovered how to identify real XP discs and eject copies. I know, that sounds totally tinfoil hat conspiracy-freakish but I have worked with these discs enough, even booting them successfully in this MBP prior to installing Snow Leopard, that something is really really fishy.

 

I can boot from Leopard, Snow Leopard, original MS Windoes XP Pro discs. Cannot boot from anything that is a copy, even when those copies boot fine in other systems and laptops.

 

Is the MBP doing something like reading ISO headers to check from Microsoft labels?

 

I even installed rEFIt v0.13. If the XP copy CD is in the drive when the MBP powers up it ejects it before trying to boot any other device. Even if I hold 'Option' it will still spin up the CD, read it and eject it before giving options to boot from other devices.

 

Am I losing my mind?

[Synaesthesia]

That's crazy. Freaking Apple! Typical!