Truly bizarre problem using Boot camp on MacBook Pro

[psikahn]

Hello,

I'm new to these forums but thought I would try posting here based on the intelligent responses many posters seem to offer to the problems and questions posed by one another. Hopefully I can contribute something in the future, but for the moment I could use some help:

 

I've encountered an odd problem with Boot Camp on my Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo. I got it in late August and grabbed a copy of XP to install so I could play some games. The install went perfectly and I jumped back and forth between XP and OS X without hitch for a few months. Then suddenly one day I would get stuck on a black screen if I ever tried to boot into Win XP. The black screen would come up right after I selected the icon for my XP partition, and was not accompanied by any error message, just a plain black screen. I assumed what any faithful Mac user would assume, that XP had just screwed itself up somehow, and so I decided to delete my windows partition and then create a new one and reinstall. However to my great surprise, when I went to do so, after inserting my XP installer and restarting, I would get stuck at the same black screen after the grey startup screen when the macbook first powers on. The XP install disc sounds like it's spinning up properly but it never seems to kick in and it just leaves me at the black screen. I then proceeded to try any remedies I could possibly think of, ultimately deleting the partion and erasing the entire drive and reinstalling OS X, but the problem persists. Whatever is causing the problem must be something that could have been changed by me inadvertently (as boot camp USED to work fine) but also something that is not overwritten by erasing and reinstalling OSX. I have not modified the hardware in any way since I got the computer. There are no external devices connected, and my firmware is up to date. Any ideas? I'm generally able to get my Mac to do what I need it to so this has been incredibly frustrating and any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks so much for your time!

-Terry

[U.C.]

This normally happens when XP gets confused the partition structure.

 

If clearing the harddisk didnot fix this problem, then you need to totally clear the hard disk. You would have to run a zeroing tool by the harddrive manufacturer to write zeros all over your harddisk. This will clear all remaining data on the disk. At least thats what I would do on a PC.

 

On macbook AFAIK they have EFI partition and some weird partition structure, so make sure you know how to recreate that.

[psikahn]

Thanks for the response, U.C. Turns out OS X disk utility will zero out the drive for you, but regrettably this didn't seem to solve the problem. There must be some sort of problem with the EFI, specifically the way it's supposed to transition into BIOS to load windows. I know very little about this aspect of computer operations, and I'm not sure how it could have become corrupt or what can be done to fix it. The computer insists its EFI firmware is up to date. Is there a way to completely refresh the EFI firmware or edit its settings?

[Paul2660]

A few more thoughts,

 

With XP (more than likely Vista also), a black screen on boot means your boot.ini has been corrupted. In the older days with FAT32, you could often times fix the boot.ini and come back up. However with NTFS, this is much harder to do. You can also run into this same problem if you move a boot primary NTFS partiion to a new physical hard drive. Many times during the move the boot.ini will get corrupted and you will stop on the same black screen. You can look at the drive and see all the files, but that one simple file will cause the problem.

 

In your situation. I would recommend a total reformat of the hard drive. You mentioned the OSX disk utility and some problems so I am not sure where you are.

I would try coming back up in OSX and deleting the entire XP hard drive partition. Reboot, come back into OSX and re-create the XP partion. I would also create it at a different size in MB. Go ahead and reformat it as NTFS, and follow the standard boot camp setup.

 

If that won't work, the only other thing I think of is to totally blow away the entire hard drive, use the Drive Utility program to do a low level format of the entire hard drive, reload your base OSX load, then retry boot camp.

 

The black screen IMO is non recoverable unless you can come up with a good hack. I have tried to recover machines with tools that are supposed to fix the boot.ini and it never works with NTFS.

 

Paul C

[psikahn]

Paul,

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I have reformatted the drive and reinstalled OS X, including the full reformat where it wipes the disk and rewrites everything as 0's. I've also deleted and recreated the windows partition multiple times. I can't even get the windows installer to work, as it goes to the same black screen I was originally getting trying to get into XP. I'm not concerned about lost data, I have everything backed up, I just can't seem to get XP installed. I downloaded rEFIt and made a bootable cd to run the toolkit off of. I ran the gptsync.efi function to see what happened, and it did in fact detect a discrepancy between the gpt and mbr and supposedly corrected it, but still black screen when the installer is supposed to kick in. It has to be something that isn't overwritten by a reformat but I could have accidently screwed up somehow (since it was working fine for some time). All I ever did in XP was play games. I'm baffled.

[Paul2660]

I am stumped!. A complete low level format should have fixed the problem if there was something going on with your current XP install. When you reloaded OSX, that should have fixed the issue for sure as everything would have been put back as when the machine was brand new.

 

One thing migh be the install CD you are using has an issue with it. I have run into this, not the same problem you are having, but later on in the install. Can you locate a different XP install CD? or maybe copy yours and try the copy?

XP has alot of quirks and the like and the black screen issue can be caused by many things, but if you have totally reformated the drive as you state, then everything should be starting over from scratch.

 

You may have mentioned this, but make sure your EFI bios is the correct level, if you reinstalled OSX from the original OSX recovery CD, it may have re written the EFI bios to a version that XP can work with. I know that when I purchased my MBP in July of 2006, I had to upgrade the EFI bios before i could install XP. By reinstalling the OSX, I wouldn't have thought that the EFI bios would be overwritten, but with Mac's I am not that sure.

 

On a Fresh install, when you get a black screen like you mention, it's my understanding that XP can't see something very basic, like memory, hard drive etc. and it is hanging. When XP starts the install it does a quick check of the machine being installed on to make sure the basic hardware is there.

 

The only other solution is replace the hard drive and then reinstall the OSX, then follow the steps for XP's install. However on a MBP Apple has made this a very hard thing to do. Which is most unfortunate IMO.

 

Paul C