Recently I upgraded my MBP with a larger hard disk. While the data migration from my old hard disk went nearly seamlessly (thanks to CarbonCopyCloner) and took me about 4 h (1h tinkering, 3h copying data), the BootCamp/Windows migration kept me busy for another day and nearly failed in the end.

First I tried to make an image of my win partition with WinClone. I know from some people that this solution did great for them, but it didn’t for me. I couldn’t figure out why…

Then I tried to simply reinstall WinXP with SP2 through the BootCamp assistance. But every time the system rebooted for installation, I got a disk failure message.

I remembered, that I had formated the BootCamp partition with the NT File System the last time, but couldn’t recall on which way. A lot of trails and errors later, I recognized that I had the wrong Windows installer. I don’t now why, but in this version I didn’t had the option to reformat the partition.

So I learned: You have to format the BootCamp partition during the windows installation process with the help of the windows installer. If you also have one of these strange versions of XP like me, you could also be lucky with the help of a freeDOS boot-CD.

Than everything went fine until I installed the Service Pack 3. After a reboot, the system did nothing.

So I started again… this time I decided to do no update never again, but again: only a black screen after the installation of some software.

It took over 5 times of installing WinXP - again and again - until I realized, that the problem was my iPod.

Windows refuses to boot with an iPod plugged in…