Posts tagged ‘intel mac’

Boot Camp / Windows Vista Install Errors

Recently I was helping an out of town friend install Vista on an Intel Mac running Leopard when we bumped into an issue.  After they got Vista up and running, they could not install, download or save anything into their account.  It would always give a disk error, say the file was corrupt or state that they had an invalid path.  This problem was super annoying because we could not install any applications that would allow us to remote login.  The problem turned out to be invalid characters in the account name.  We fixed the problem by simply creating a new account and deleting the old.  In retrospect, the solution is simple but here is a little back story …

During the install process the wireless mouse and keyboard were not detected.  This prevented my friend from typing a username.  He quickly improvised and used a corded mouse and was able to copy and paste characters to create a username and proceed to the next step.  While doing so, Vista inserted special characters that did not display on the screen into the username and then created a folder for all of the account information with the same invalid name (why didn’t Vista check the name – good question).  This invalid directory lead to all of our errors running executables.  I noticed the strange directory when I viewed the properties and file path.  The username always looked normal.