10.5 Leopard – “Disk error” After Installing Windows Using Boot Camp Assistant

Problem: After running Boot Camp Assistant and doing an initial install of Windows, you get the error message “Press any key to boot from CD. Disk Error. Press any key to restart.” when initially booting into the Windows partition after Windows setup completes. This problem is described in this apple support document: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306504

Solution: You need to actually reformat the Windows partition that Boot Camp created. It will be the parition named “BOOTCAMP”. IMPORTANT: Do not use the option named “Leave the current file system intact (no changes)”. Choose to either format the BOOTCAMP partition as either NTFS or FAT format. If you format the partition in NTFS format, you will not be able to write to the drive while booted into OS X. You will have read-only access to it. However if you choose to format the drive as FAT then you will be able to both read and write to the Windows drive while booted into OS X. The advantage of NTFS is that it gives you finer grain control on file access and there is also a performance improvement.