Need help please! boot camp related

Question

Im in desperate need of help.
Heres the story:
I partioned my drive to 100 gb windows (xp home), with about 131 gb for Leopard.
I followed the prompts during the installation, until i got to the screen listing the available drives for installing windows. The only drive that came up was the 131 gb one, which was the Leopard-dedicated section with all of my data on it.
I restarted the computer several times to no avail. I still just had the 131gb option come up. I did click on the 131 gb drive option (out of desperation i guess) but when prompter to install, i quit the application.
After restarting the laptop several more times and trying again, i took out the xp cd having given up on the whole thing. Upon doing so, a blank white screen came up, which after about 10 seconds turned into a dark screen with a white flashing line at the top left hand corner.I tried restarting and waiting but nothing worked.
Ive browsed some other forums and found out that by holding the 'opyion' key at start up you can switch between drives. When i tried this, it only gave me one drive to choose from, which was labelled 'windows'. I clicked on it and got the same white then dark with flashing line screens.
In serious need of help, if ive lost all of the data on that leopard drive im royally screwed.
Hopefully that was comprehendable, any help will be appreciated greatly.
Message was edited by: seb123

Answer 1

I had exactly the same problem a few weeks ago (with a XP Pro SP2), and as you did, and being as desperate as you were, I also clicked on the 131 drive option. The result was : start-up drivers were broken, so the machine had to go back to Apple care center and I got it back three weeks later. All my data were lost, they even had to change the hard drive. Strange thing was I didn't have to pay anything for that (whereas I did recognize that this was my fault for I selected a wrong partition). So I guess Apple is now experiencing some problems with Bootcamp… Anyway you shall never select any other partition as the one wich is named "Bootcamp". Otherwise you can overwrite all your OS X soft and this can be some sort of nightmare. Sorry. When I got back my iMac I tried again (with 70 GO for Windows that time) and the same things happened ; but this time as I saw only one partition I just quit the whole thing (F3 key) and got back to OS X, and re-opened Bootcamp to get back to a single Mac OS partition. No problem… but no Windows. I think we'd better wait for further info from Apple. Perhaps we can also try with 32 Go partition and FAT format and see what happens then (I think I will try this). Or buy a Vista and see what happens (NTFS format required but automatic, so it seems to be easier).
Did you try to install XP or Vista ?
Good luck
Regards.
And have a look on this forum, unless you already did it :
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1199436&tstart=0
I must admit I don't really understand what they say about freeDOS, but this must be read…