I never bothered with Apple’s Boot Camp feature under 10.4 because I didn’t feel like repartitioning any of my production drives (at home or work) with a beta product, just for the dubious benefit of running a Windows operating system on Apple hardware (I already have three Windows boxes at home and another at work).

Nonetheless, I decided to give it a spin on my new MacBook Pro. After some initial frustration caused by not realizing Boot Camp Assistant only recognizes partitions made by Boot Camp Assistant (and not the FAT32 partition I’d set up with Apple’s Disk Utility, which seems stupid), I was all set to install XP. I had my partition, had my XP SP2 disc and some free time. None of it, however, did any good.

I don’t know why, but Boot Camp simply fails on this system. It reboots to a gray screen, then the MBP spits the XP install disc out and proceeds no further (unless you count a “bootable partition not found” error some minutes later to be progress). There’s been similar-sounding cases discussed on the Apple forums, but my OS X partition is (mercifully) both intact and bootable.

I’ve tried and failed to put the MBP through Boot Camp six times, always with the same results. The disc I used has been used to create successful Boot Camp Windows installations before, and I’ve even swapped media just to be sure. So I give up; I’m stumped. Anybody else had this problem?