I've had it with bootcamp!!!
 

so the first few times bootcamp broke, it was during a few months intervals, because i hadnt updated the drivers, but last week i reinstalled it, and today it froze up again, i tried repairing windows, that did nothing, so i reinstalled it again and it froze up after id rebooted after installing the mac drivers, is the problem in my mac, or my windows cd? There no scratches on the disk so the only thing i can think of is that ive used the serial code too many times, but now i dont have a way of playing my windows games, i tried the demo of parallels but that only let me use 64mb of my video card and only one of my games would work, please tell me by the time leopard comes out all the bugs in bootcamp will be fixed, and in the meantime am i better of buying a cheap windows pc? or can anyone help me fix bootcamp!?!

Sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulties. I'm a fairly critical person by nature, but I have to say that Bootcamp has worked flawlessly for me since I started using it.

You may want to use Bootcamp to lose the Windows partition, then try reinstalling from scratch.

[QUOTE=Truth42;395339]Sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulties. I'm a fairly critical person by nature, but I have to say that Bootcamp has worked flawlessly for me since I started using it.
QUOTE]
That is rather odd to hear for me, because I also haven't had have any problems with Boot Camp + Parallels combo so far. It works good.

I'm not critical at all, and I'm a big fun of Parallels + Boot Camp. Everything works fine.;)

I have deployed whole computer labs of iMacs that dual boot via bootcamp and have not had any issues surprisingly.

Also the newest version of Parallels allows for full DX9 support, so you may want to upgrade your parallels desktop software.

heres the thing though, i did a fresh install of osx and it still crashed

Perhaps you have a hardware issue since the hardware is taxed in certain ways when installing an OS. You may want to have it checked out, is it under warranty?

finished in Feb this year

so what are my options then? or will the release with leopard fix things???

If it's a hardware problem an Operating System upgrade is unlikely to make it go away. And given all these other folks claiming success I'd definitely suggest having a tech run some diagnostics on the machine.

I'm with Craig. Are there any other odd things your computer is doing on the OSX side?

not really, but after i removed the partition a few weeks ago to retry it, i had t repair my hd and format it before it would let me install it again

and can you recommend some diagnostic checking software?

You have the hardware test that came on the restore DVDs that shipped with your iMac. Boot to that DVD while holding the D (for diagnostics!), and choose to run the extended testing.
The symptoms that you describe would make me suspicious of the hard drive, or the memory that you have installed.

i ran the test, and it said there were no problems, so err whats left as a problem?

Well, there's hardware - marginal RAM, or a poorly-behaving hard drive as possibles.
What types of external hardware do you normally have attached?
How about a flaky external USB hub - often a culprit in these types of problems, or something else external?
Those are something to think about, but then, there's software.
Does your iMac give you any problems when your are _not_ booted to Windows? Any problems with the Mac side at all?
Or, do you only have problems when booted to Windows? Don't try to blame the Bootcamp software, as that is _not_ in use after Windows is installed, and you are booted to Windows. All Windows needs is one good hard freeze, and you potentially whack the Windows partition, requiring some disk utility work, nothing unusual there!
Are you giving your Windows enough partition space? The default from BootCamp can be as low as 5GB, which I wouldn't use to store a dog, let alone try to use a real operating system.
I don't know if _any_ of these really apply to your situation, but maybe there's something to think about...

so many possibilities, so little space!

i give it 32gb because games like san andreas take up like 6 gb of hd space, i do have a usb hub, one of those cheapy ebay ones, but all thats in there is a usb extention cable (with nothing connected) my microsoft mouse and my apple keyboard, and in teh back of my mac theres the printer, and a external hd which is switched off, my imac used to give me a problem where finder would sometimes crash, but since i did a fresh install all seems well, are there any like windows disk utility software (free) which would work in safe mode, maybe that would, help, and when i reinstall everything later today, i will only have my mouse and keyboard plugged in

also, would the way i format the partition matter? and could the fact that ive used my serial code like 20 times make any difference

That only matters when you activate windows online. You can sit there and reinstall windows a billion times and it wouldn't matter. It only matters when you try to activate it over and over and over again.

well, i'll make a new partition and let you guys know how it goes, wish me luck

lo and behold, it froze again, but it happens the second time i reboot the computer, the first time i reboot is after i install the drivers, and all is well, i can install things play games, but its the second time after that, when i update windows, or install and update for anti virus software that it crashes......*sigh*

Starts crashing after you install some new software? Any change if you uninstall that new software? Or, do you always have to reinstall to get Windows to work properly again? Seems like it's not a problem with Windows, but the software you add... eh?

I still recommend you have someone take a look at it. I only say this because I have installed windows on many many macs and have not had the problems you have had. You are installing windows with a SP2 CD right?

yeah its sp2 disk, and the only software thats installed is the windows updates and the mac drivers