Working around Boot Camp/Windows XP Installation Freezing

Bootcamp on Mac OSX by Shht!

I was just trying to install Windows XP using Boot Camp on my Macbook and hit an issue where upon reaching the prompt asking me to “hit Enter to install Windows XP, R to Repair an Installation and F3 to exist” my Macbook would freeze.

Rebooting wouldn’t help because there’s no way to extract the CD in the drive and it no longer defaults to booting into OS X. So, your Macbook becomes a brick.

Here’s how to bring your MacBook to life in this situation.

If you are using a mighty mouse, connect it to the USB port directly.

If you don’t have any peripherals connected, then press the ‘alt’ key during bootup and you will prompted on which partition should be used for bootup. At this point select the Mac partition and you will boot in to OS X. You can eject the CD in your drive from within OS X.

A theory around why this freeze occurs is that the keyboard isn’t correctly setup and Windows doesn’t understand the ‘enter/return’ key on the keyboard. Some people suggest trying the small ‘enter’ key right next to the ‘home’ key. This didn’t work for me, but I was trying to install Windows XP with an unsupported installation disk – it lacked Service Pack 2. So, make sure you have an XP installation CD that includes service pack 2.

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