After installing 10.5, can no longer boot into WinXP via Boot Camp!

October 30, 2007 12:51 PM

After doing a clean install of MacOS X Leopard, while leaving my previous Boot Camp partition in tact, I'm getting a blue-screen when attempting to boot directly into XP via Boot Camp...

... I can, however, run the Boot Camp partition in a Parallels VM just fine. The blue screen of death is mentioning a driver "ati2dvag.dll" or something similar. It appears that I need to update the drivers from the Leopard install DVD. The problem is, I can't get into Windows to do that.

I'm able to get into Safe Mode, but I cannot run the Boot Camp installation because the Windows Installer service is not running. I've tried to start it manually but to no avail. From within Safe Mode, I've also attempted to perform installs on the individual drivers from within the Leopard DVD, but they will not load either.

And since Parallels has its own configuration with separate drivers, I cannot update the drivers from within Parallels - it appears that will only mess up my Parallels VM. Any suggestions how I can get in to update those drivers somehow, or am I doomed to reformat and reinstall XP?

posted by Ekim Neems to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Sounds like the ATI video driver to me.

I am assuming the boot camp driver disk has the drivers in unpacked form on there. If you boot into safe mode you should be able to right click on the desktop and pick properties.

From there, settings, then the advanced button.

Then the adapter tag where there's a properties button. From there you can open the DRIVER tab and use the update driver option.

if you can't get there via that path in safe mode (not gonna reboot just to verify this for you) then you can open the control panel, then the System control panel, then the device button. The ATI card should be under the display adaptors group and, again, you can get to the properties and tell it to update the driver.

if the new drivers are on the CD in an uncompressed fashion then it should find them.
posted by phearlez at 1:24 PM on October 30, 2007

It's actually a full-blown installer for the ATI drivers. I wonder if somehow I can extract the drivers, or they're available as standalone drivers on the web?
posted by Ekim Neems at 1:32 PM on October 30, 2007

Boot into safe mode, uninstall the ATI drivers via Device Manager, then you should be able to get back into Windows normally and reinstall the drivers..
posted by mphuie at 1:47 PM on October 30, 2007

I realize it's a full installer but in my experience it's pretty rare that the files themselves aren't uncompressed in a directory in the installer tree. In such cases the full installer is a nice time saver but not strictly necessary.

I'd try that update driver option if I were you, or at least search the cd for files ending in .INF to see if they're in fact in there uncompressed.
posted by phearlez at 1:48 PM on October 30, 2007

Ekim, I'm getting ready to do the same thing myself, and I just wanted to know which Mac-video card combination you have so I can avoid a similar situation.

Also, from what I can recall when I looked at my Tiger 1.4 beta driver disc, the driver files are compressed.
posted by infinitewindow at 2:10 PM on October 30, 2007

From what I can see, there are only executable installers, unfortunately.

I have a 2.16ghz c2d MBP w/ 128mb ATI. Not sure what the exact model # is, but that configuration.
posted by Ekim Neems at 3:16 PM on October 30, 2007

You don't actually need full-bore Safe Mode to stop Windows using broken video drivers; there's a "VGA mode" option on the same menu that has Safe Mode on it, for precisely that purpose. If you boot Windows that way, the only thing disabled is device-specific video drivers.
posted by flabdablet at 9:51 PM on October 30, 2007