XP installation failure

[PaulBradley]

I tried installing XP Home and it failed early on, stating that I had to restart the machine and try again. I restarted, but now what? When I boot up Fusion and reload the VM, I get a black screen that I can't do anything with, so I can't provide a screen shot of the failure point (if there's a way to get it, it's certainly not intuitive from the Fusion menus). There seems to be no menu option in Fusion to delete a VM and start over. So what do I do now?

[dszpiro]

Oh man oh man, I hope someone answers you soon as I have the exact same problem.

[Deryni]

Well, you could delete the VM and start over by going into your Documents/Virtual Machines directory and deleting the VM from there.

Alternately what has probably happened is that XP has already written a valid boot loader to your virtual hard drive, so when the VM does the normal "look for bootable device" sequence, your virtual hard drive is considered to be bootable.

You can either hit ESC when it's showing the VMware logo to bring up a boot menu (where you can pick to boot from the CDROM), or go into the VM's BIOS and change the boot order in there.

[admin]

XP probably installed to the point where the BIOS recognizes it as a bootable drive (and so doesn't try to boot off the CD), but not enough to do anything further. As mentioned in other threads, you can delete the virtual machine from the Finder (default location is ~/Documents/Virtual Machines/), then create a new one.

Also, what was the exact error and where was it (in the guest, from Fusion, or from OS X)?