I got another call back from Apple today. It seems that something little by little is getting fixed and then it breaks. I even zero out the drive before i even make a single partition. I've done many clean installs and touched nothing but bootcamp and its drivers. I always use the bootcamp assistant, and even that has trouble booting the install disc for the first time. Microsoft after going through 3 levels of support basically hung up and told me i needed a new BIOS. Apple finds it strange that I cannot hold down D during the boot and go into diagnostic mode. I've been on many phone calls with apple and i have a case number with them. I've done several reinstalls using different xp installation disks (professional site licence vs home) and mac retail vs the packaged imac one. And refit goes through the same process when I hold option, however, it does give me some more information on the first hang:Įrror: Not found return from legacy loader Įrror: load error while (re)opening our installation volume Bootpicker is useless, it just shows me a grey screen when I click on windows every time. If this were my machine i would be fine, but to educate everybody that uses my lab to do this is insanity. Seems like a problem with the MBR finding windows boot files. Second time, It gets past this screen and hangs and says 'A Disk Read Error Occured. Seems like a problem emulating the BIOS or something.

First reboot, when holding down option, Mac and Windows shows up, I click on windows and it freezes the screen right there, still showing Mac and Windows, and It's unresponsive. It takes approx 3 reboots for me to get into the windows side. The process as I understand how booting to windows works (correct me if i'm wrong) POST > EFI > BIOS > MBR >WINDOWS. However the windows side takes a couple of reboots to actually work. We haven't bought the other 19 yet.Īnyway, something is very wrong with the boot process for windows xp. We bought one of the newest iMac's 21.5 inch and I started from scratch to create a new image for these machines. The CRTs on these guys are going so we decided to clean up the lab and replace them all with iMac's.

Install windows 7 on imac with bootcamp