VM and Windows 8

Hi All, .......... I had no problem installing the W-8 Developers Preview. When I tried installing W-8 Consumers Preview by the several suggested methods l had problems installing it. Finally, I got the Consumers Preview installed with VM. Now however when I want to get back to Windows 7, I'm trapped with the W-8 appearing and no dual boot that I had with the Developer Preview.

I'm writing this from a Windows 7 back up disk. If necessary, I could wipe the W-8 disk but felt that someone with some experience with W-8 may offer some help.

 

Arie, .......... I'll try explaining by going through the process of installing and using Windows 8. W-8 had been placed on a DVD. This was transferred to my computer through a program, VMware Player, labeled "The easiest way to run a virtual machine." This was also my first experience with VM. Now I had the opportunity to examine W-8. To close W-8 I used Ctl- Alt-Del and clicked on the icon in the lower-right corner to shut my computer down. On the next Start-up and any succeeding start-ups W-8 loaded and filled my screen. At that point it appeared that all I could run was W-8.

In thinking about your reply and "booting into Windows8" I have to agree, but this leaves the question of getting back to Windows7 (dual boot?). If you have any guidance on this point now that I'm showing my inexperience with VM and W-8, I'll appreciate it.

 

Arie, .......... Thank you for your interest and support. I have wiped the Windows 8 disk completely and cloned the windows 7 backup disk to it. So now I'm back to where I was before my problem developed. For the immediate future I'll continue to determine why I had problems installing Windows 8 in the first place.

 

It sounds to me that you didn't designate a CD ROM for the virtual machine and when you put the disk in to install it you ended up installing it on your physical drive and not on a virtual drive. I've seen many people do this before - usually by jumping in and not following the proper steps to set up a virtual hard disk on your computer. VMWare doesn't have a config for the Easy Install procedure for Windows 8 yet so it won't recognize the install disk to do so. There are several parameters involved in setting up your virtual machine manually and following the directions is a must for success. I have heard that Virtual Box is easier to use and they have updated their config for Windows 8 installs but I haven't used Virtual Box myself to verify this.

The first step in VMWare is to choose an operating system to install. VMWare suggests to use the Windows 7 64 bit setting to install Windows 8 DP and CP until they update their config. They are planning an update for this soon if they haven't by now. I use VMWare workstation and have successfully installed Windows 8 (both previews) and they work fine this way.

There are several other steps needed in order to get Windows 8 to run properly in VMWare, including an edit to the config file to increase video RAM in order for Aero to work. I suggest using Google and VMWare's website for more help if you plan on continuing using VMWare.

 

Arie and bmh67wa, ............... I'm sorry that I got you so involved with VM. As I said in my first post this was another way to install Windows 8. My mistake was installing to a clean disk and naturally W8 installed to the first partition. After starting over with a clean disk and making four partitions I cloned the newly partitioned disk from my backup disk which had one empty partition. Now when I started the install of W8 on the cloned disk I used the Custom install (and not Upgrade) as my choice and this allowed me to select the empty partition as the home for W8. At this point I now had the dual boot choice of Windows 7 or Windows 8.

Thank you both for helping.

 

DerfSch,

I think you're not running a VM. What you did was transferring Windows 8 from a DVD into your computer. That's why you need to wipe it over and re-install Windows 7.

I run Windows 8 DP and CP on OS X 10.7.3 with Fusion 4.1.1 as VMs. No problem at all. Virtual Box (from Oracle) has much less features than Fusion or Parallels. I tried running Windows 8 on Mac and access it on iPad. It's no good at all on 3G; Wi-Fi is acceptable.

Any one has experience running it on Citrix? Or Citrix + VMware?