Once you click the Start Installation button within Boot Camp Assistant, it is assumed that your Windows install disc is in your optical drive — either a drive on your system or an external drive. Thereafter your Mac will reboot, and start off the Windows install disc to begin installing Microsoft Windows to your newly created Boot Camp partition.
If all goes fine, then that’s great. But if you see an error — maybe there is an error reading your disc or some communication error. First ascertain that you are indeed stuck and cannot proceed — then hold the Power button on your Mac to shut down the computer. Thereafter, hold the Option (Alt) key while you restart your computer. Most probably you will see a menu with a single option that lets you boot to your Mac OS — choose this option and boot into your Mac OS X partition.
Make sure you have an alternative installation disc or another optical drive — maybe you can attach an external optical drive. Then ascertain that the Windows install disc is now accessible.
You can next start Boot Camp Assistant. The first two screens will be similar to what you see when running Boot Camp Assistant for the time — but the third screen will differ. Since your Boot Camp partition has already been created, you won’t be asked to carve a new partition at this point of time. Rather you will be presented with the two options you can see in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Relaunch Boot Camp Assistant
These options are:
- Create or remove a Windows partition: You can choose to create a new Boot Camp partition — or delete any existing Boot Camp partition.
- Start the Windows installer: Lets you restart the Windows installer.
To launch the Windows installation again, please choose the second option and click Continue. This will reboot your computer and start the Windows installation again.