[X4U] Very weird disk corruption - pleas for help!

[Jim Robertson]

1st gen MacBook Pro, 1.83 GHz, 2 Gigs RAM, updated to 10.5.2.

For the past year, I've run Win XP Home via Boot Camp, but decided on a whim
to install Fusion 1.1. Once I did, I apparently didn't get VMWare Tools
installed correctly, and the Windows partition tried to find various drivers
from the Internet. Eventually the update seemed finished, but now Win
demanded activation - except that I couldn't complete booting into Windows
to be able to activate. So, I decided to chuck the whole thing, recreate a
Boot Camp partition and reinstall Windows. THAT didn't work because my
version of WinXP Home is an UPGRADE, and I've tossed my ole Win ME from
Virtual PC days. So, I ordered a full version of Win XP Home and began
preparing for IT by trying to delete, then re-create the Boot Camp
partition. In the process of the latter, I got my first kernal panic ever on
this computer (repetitively).

I tried to repair the disk with Disk Utility from the Leopard Install disk.
It won't boot the computer! The optical drive grunts repetitively in the
same pattern while the little gear wheel spins (I've let it run like this
for 20 minutes).

No problem, says I, and I pull out my DiskWarrior 4 CD, boot from it, run
DiskWarrior and reclaim the missing 15 Gigabytes from my drive. Only thing
is, the OS X 10.5 install disk STILL won't boot the computer despite the
repaired directory on the internal hard drive, and when I run Boot Camp
Assistant one more time, I get another kernal panic.

I'll be traveling this weekend (hopefully with this computer) and will need
the laptop on a 10 day trip. My new Windows XP comes tomorrow, and as of now
things don't look rosy for installing it. I cannot reinstall my Leopard OS
because the Leopard Installer disk won't boot the computer (I think the
Windows install disk did something perhaps to the lowest level partition
map, but I don't know WHY I think that other than even after I deleted the
Boot Camp partition, before I selected the Mac OS partition for booting the
screen would appear with white text on black background telling me to "press
any key to boot from CD ROM drive" or something like that.

Any ideas what I should try next? I do have the original MacBook Pro system
disk. I don't know whether I can start the computer from IT, but I don't
know why that disk would boot it if the Leopard Installer won't (of course,
the Leopard installer DID work on this box previously, which is how I got
Leopard on it in the first place.

Jim Robertson
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