Formatting Windows in a Boot Camp Partition

By Ryan, ryan@smalldog.com

I ran in to a really annoying problem the other day when I was doing a windows Boot Camp install on a new machine for a customer. As normal, I used the Boot Camp setup assistant in the Utilities folder to create the Boot Camp partition. I booted from the Windows disk and chose the new partition to install Windows.

Boot Camp by default sets the partition up as FAT32, but I went ahead and reformatted it as NTFS. After the copying of installation files completed, the computer restarted (in preparation of the actual install), but to my dismay, I got a black screen stating that “Hal.dll is corrupted.”

Curious, I went back to OS X by holding the Option key at boot, deleted the partition, recreated it and tried again. This time, I left it as a FAT32 volume. Again, I got a black screen but this time it said “no boot disk found.” So I went to the Apple discussion forums to find a fix. I found loads of outlandish solutions, such as one that involved the removal of files from the Windows disk and then re-burning it.

By Ryan, ryan@smalldog.com