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MacBook Boot Camp Rhapsody iRiver Oddities 0 0

I have been trying to get Rhapsody to successfully sync the licenses on an iRiver H320 for quite a while. My first attempt was to purchase Parallels, create a virtual partition, load Windows XP into that partition, install Rhapsody, connect the iRiver through a USB port, and launch the Rhapsody Sync process. This resulted in a crashed Windows system. I finally gave up on getting this to work after about 20 hours of effort.

Boot Camp Disk Partitioning Problem

Next I purchased a copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and tried installing that using Apple's Boot Camp. The first thing that went wrong was the disk partitioning, which failed with this message:

Disk cannot be partitioned because verification failed. Use Disk Utility to repair the disk

OK. So I ran Disk Utility, identified the disk I wanted to repair, and "Repair" button was grayed out. Repairing the disk was not an option!

More Internet searching, and I found articles by people who received similar errors. It turns out that "Repair" was not an option, because I needed to repair the disk I was currently booted on! To repair this disk, I'd have to reboot in single user mode. If I was lucky, then fsck would be albe to fix the disk. Since the error was "invalid free block count" I felt pretty confident that running fsck would fix the problem.

So, how does one go about booting a MacBook in single user mode? More Internet searching... Answer: hold down the command icon and S while the system is booting. Doing this made the system boot using a command prompt text screen. Pressing enter a few times eventually gave me a command prompt, but every now and then some text outputs appeared and made it impossible to complete the command I was trying to type.

I ran:

fsck -f

The first time, fsck said:

FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED

The second time I ran fsck, it said:

Volume appears to be OK

I was golden (probably)!

Windows XP with Boot Camp on MacBook

The next steps appeared to go well. I select a FAT file system for Windows XP, installed XP with no problem, created two user accounts... Then I tried to install the Boot Camp Drivers from the Boot Camp CD. After telling Windows to go ahead and software that hasn't been officially approved for Windows many times, the system suddenly crashed to a blue screen with white text. The screen was frozen!

Attempts to reboot into Windows left me with the login screen, but no mouse pointer. I removed my USB mouse and tried again. Same result. I tried to reinstall Windows, starting with the Windows CD. The install crashed.

Finally I decided to start from scratch by reformatting my Windows partition. I kept my USB mouse disconnected as well, just in case that was part of the problem. This time I selected an NTFS file system, and I created only one user account. Windows XP installed fine again.

I wondered: can I get this to work without installing the dreaded Boot Camp Drivers CD? The answer: no, I had no Internet connectivity, hence no way to connect to Rhapsody.com to update my iRiver (remember, that was the goal of this entire effort).

I put the Boot Camp Drivers in the CD drive, and again told Windows to install all the applications, waiting for the crash that had occurred the previous time.

No crash happened! Suddenly, I had a working dual-boot MacBook! With the Internet fully accessible. I had made just three changes in my Windows XP installation, and that made the difference between a successful installation and a non-working system:

Installation Step	First (failed) Installation	Second (successful) Installation
Use USB Mouse?	Yes	No
Windows File System	FAT (Quick Format)	NTFS (Full Format)
Windows User Accounts	2	1

Some combination of these three changes apparently turned my failed XP installation into a successful installation.

But Can Rhapsody Sync the iRiver?

I loaded the Rhapsody application into Windows XP, connected my iRiver to the USB port, and I was able to sync the songs on the iRiver (in other words, refresh their licenses, which expire after 30 days).

The next time I tried to sync the iRiver, the Rhapsody application crashed. But it succeeded on a retry. A bit quirky, but it now works!

And I now know a lot more about my MacBook and Boot Camp...