issue with Windows XP boot after Mac OSx upgrade to 10.6.8

Made a long overdue upgrade to my wife’s macbook pro a couple of weekends ago, and now I’m having problems getting it to boot up Windows. Here’s the background

Machine is a 2007 MacBook Pro, 2.4 Ghz processor with 2 GB RAM

Old install:
Mac OSx 10.5.8
Parallels 3.0
Bootcamp windows XP partition on the hard drive

We ran Parallels to launch windows XP a couple of weeks prior to the upgrade. Everything ran fine. Can’t remember the last time we booted the machine directly into Windows, but I know we did that successfully in the past.

Upgraded to:
Mac OSx 10.6.8
(Parallels 3.0 won’t install on that OSx version)

What I see:
Try to boot up Windows from the startup (using the option key to select the boot drive). The system sees the Windows partition, soes through the steps of showing the Windows XP logo, then the blue screen comes up with the message "autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK". That disappears quickly, and then the machine goes to the Mac partition and boots Mac OSx.


Possible solutions?
From reading other posts, it might be that the drive table (?) was modified by the Parallels instl such that it now won’t boot the windows partition without seeing a parallels installation. With that in mind, I’m wondering if I should download a free copy of Parallels 8, install that, and see if everything runs correctly (both from startup and from Parallels within OSx.

Does anyone have any other ideas or suggestions? I don’t’ want to wipe the Windows install and start over, as I have some old WIndows software for which I have misplaced the instl & license info. We did not set up an admin password for the windows install, so I’m out of luck (I think) on running the repair utility with the Windows instl CD. I do have a CD with some bootcamp drivers from the original install in 2007.

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi Chris,

A couple of questions/comments -
1. Are you seeing the problem when you are trying to start Windows in BootCamp directly or in Parallels Desktop virtual machine? If this is VM you are trying to start, which version of Parallels Desktop are you running now?

2. What happens when you start Windows in BootCamp natively?

We indeed had significant changes since version 3, but it does not affect BootCamp functionality (natively).

Also have you tried just to recreate BootCamp based VM?

 

Answers to questions:

1. Are you seeing the problem when you are trying to start Windows in BootCamp directly or in Parallels Desktop virtual machine? Answer - I am seeing the problem when I try to start Windows in BootCamp directly.
If this is VM you are trying to start, which version of Parallels Desktop are you running now? Answer - I did a complete reinstall of the Mac OSx operating system when I updated it from 10.5.8 to 10.6.8. When I tried to reinstall Parallels 3.0, I got a message that is was not compatible with this version of the Mac OS (10.6.8). Therefore, I do not have any version of Parallels running on the computer at this time.

2. What happens when you start Windows in BootCamp natively? Answer - as I stated in the original posting, I try to boot up Windows from the startup (using the option key to select the boot drive). The system sees the Windows partition, goes through the steps of showing the Windows XP logo, then a blue screen comes up with the message "autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK". That disappears quickly, and then the machine goes to the Mac partition and boots Mac OSx. It does this every time I try to boot up Windows directly from the start - I never get to a WIndows login screen. And since I no longer have Parallels installed on the computer, I cannot try to launch windows from Parallels.

Also have you tried just to recreate BootCamp based VM? Answer - as I stated in the original posting, I don’t’ want to wipe the Windows install and start over, as I have some old WIndows software for which I have misplaced the instl & license info.