mac - Boot camp with Vista crashes on startup

I have a 2006 vintage MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo) and have been using Boot Camp since it was in beta. I had been running XP SP2 on it with Tiger quite happily.

I've recently wiped and reinstalled everything to upgrade to Leopard. After installing Leopard, I fired up the Boot camp assistant and used it to install the Windows 7 RC. That worked really nicely, but my HFS+ driver didn't work under Windows 7 yet so I decided to install Vista instead.

I didn't repartition the drive, just launched the Vista installation disk from BIOS and told it to overwrite the existing Windows 7 install. It installed fine and I installed the Boot Camp drivers, still all fine.

Now, however, every time I boot into Windows and login it hard reboots itself as the desktop is appearing. After this it works fine again. Until the next power off.

Has anyone had any similar problems? Or can offer suggestions on how to solve this?

You may be getting a BSOD on boot. I think XP and Vista both reboot automatically by default when this happens. You'll want to disable this "feature" and google whatever error message you are receiving.

1. Click on Start and then Control Panel.
2. Click on the System and Maintenance link. Note: If you're viewing the Classic View of Control Panel, you won't see this link. Simply double-click on the System icon and proceed to Step 4.
3. Click on the System link.
4. In the task pane on the left, click the Advanced system settings link.
5. Locate the Startup and Recovery area and click on the Settings button.
6. In the Startup and Recovery window, locate and uncheck the check box next to Automatically restart.
7. Click OK in the Startup and Recovery window.
8. Click OK in the System Properties window.
9. You can now close the System window.
10. From now on, when a problem causes a BSOD or another major error that halts the system, the PC will not automatically reboot.

Source: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windowsvista/ht/arestartvista.htm

You also may be able to find the cause of the error in the Event Log.

I have this exact problem with windows 7 on my 2006 MB pro. There is not BSOD, just goes from flashing the desktop straight to a black screen and you hear the apple honk :)

Auto reboot has been disabled, boot logging on, etc. Not nice. I opened a case with Apple and haven't heard anything yet.

update: disabling bootcamp.exe in startup (msconfig.exe) stops the wild rebooting. I enabled it again for kicks and sure enough problem came back.

I have the exact same problem and MandoMando's idea of disabling bootcamp.exe fixes the reboot-on-login issue; but I've no idea what's causing the problem considering I've been using this Windows 7 install for about 3 weeks without issues. (I'm using Windows 7 64-bit) (I would have simply upvoted MandoMando's answer but SO/SU is so fickle about rep).