Bouncybee

I’ve come across a very interesting issue with my brand new Apple Mac Book Pro 13″.  After installing bootcamp and installing Windows XP the system sometimes failed to boot on the Windows Partition.  Also referred to in the Apple Support documentation as Black Screening/Black Screen of Death.

I’ve been through to Apple Care several times now and they have advised that its a software issue and with it being Windows aren’t that interested in helping resolve it.  After trying resetting the SMC and PRAM unit on the mac and reinstalling both Windows and Max OSX several times I rang the Apple Store where it came from.

The guy there was very helpful and actually mentioned that when you reinstall both Mac OSX and remove the bootcamp partition it doesn’t actually delete anything even if you format the drive.  I realised this about the deleting but not about formatting.  So whatever the software glitch on the original install, it was clear that I wasn’t actually over writing the problem file when I kept reinstalling, hence the problem never went away.

The solution is to use the bootcamp assistant and remove your windows partition, and then go for a complete format on the whole disk of your mac using the Disk Utility App.  Make sure you backup all your work first!  Select the single disk you have now (after you have removed bootcamp) and in Disk Utility App you can do a secure erase and select 7 times.  This will ensure the disk is completely overwritten so nothing will remain.  Its a huge job and took my Mac 5 hours to scrub the 150GB hard disk before I could even put Mac OSX back on it.

Once you reinstall everything should be fine, and has been on my PC ever since!  Hope this saves a few people the several weeks of frustration i’ve just had with the reinstallation on their Mac as I couldn’t seem to find an article on the net which mentioned this!