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I've been attempting to install Windows XP using Boot Camp with Lion 10.7.4 following the procedure in Pogue's missing manual for Lion.

I have partitioned my internal HD using Disk Utility and booted to my original XP installation disk. All goes well until the Installer requests that the Enter key be pressed to continue.

The two USB wired keyboards I have tried will not work with the installer, although they do work while still running the Mac OS. Any suggestions for getting this to work?

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  • Does your mouse work? There should be a button you can click to continue, and then perhaps you may be able to install drivers for the keyboard(s). Also, what type of keyboard(s) are you using?
    – Matt
    Jul 18 '12 at 6:51
  • Matt-Thanks for responding. I didn't see a button or anything clickable. One of the keyboards (a cheapy that included an optical mouse) was USB, PC configured. The moiseuse
    – Andrew Lee
    Jul 20 '12 at 2:10
  • to continue, the mouse would only move the cursor vertically, not horizontally. The other keyboard, also pc configured was logitech. I will try a logitech mouse, but as before, I didn't see any thing clickable.
    – Andrew Lee
    Jul 20 '12 at 2:12
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    Vertically only??? That's a new one. I do know, however, that Lion does not officially support BC with anything other than Win7. This includes keyboard and mouse drivers as well. Is there an accessibility button on the screen? Perhaps you can tab to that, press space to select, and get an on-screen keyboard.
    – Matt
    Jul 20 '12 at 6:38
  • While running Windows or its installer, you are just running pure Windows on hardware that happens to have an Apple logo on the outside. There are no special drivers until you install them later. You may want to ask on a Windows support forum why your keyboard and mouse don't work. There aren't any special concerns for how Windows drives USB on Apple hardware since USB is ostensibly the same everywhere; it's almost certainly a problem with your keyboard (hardware) or the keyboard layout that's selected (software), but not your Apple hardware or the (at this point) nonexistent Apple software.
    – iynque
    Jul 20 '12 at 19:44
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You state in your question that you have partitioned your "internal HD using Disk Utility".

Frankly, I do not see how this could possibly work since the hybrid MBR on your drive would not be properly configured if you partition your drive using Disk Utility. (This is just a guess, but possibly the BIOS emulation is also not correctly enabled?)

I suggest you use Disk Utility to remove the partition you created for Win XP and then restore your OS X partition to its full size. Then use Apple's Boot Camp Assistant (located in the Utilities folder) to create the Windows partition to install XP into.

Using Boot Camp Assistant to create the partition will ensure the hybrid MBR is set up correctly.

Another alternative you might want to consider if your usage of XP is going to be minimal (i.e. no graphics intensive gaming) and your Mac has enough memory (at least 4 GiB) and a processor which supports virtualization. You might want to try installing Windows XP into a virtual machine instead.

I have had good luck using a Oracle's free, open source virtual machine VirtualBox.

The advantage of using a VM is that you don't have to reboot your Mac to use Windows. You just start the virtual machine which runs under OS X.

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