Nice one.

Windows 8 Dev Preview with Tools has a file bigger than 4GB so it cannot be stored inside a FAT formatted USB stick.
And if we format the USB stick with NTFS the UEFI BIOS wont boot from it.

How can we install "Windows 8 Dev Preview with Tools" UEFI mode using a USB stick?

Originally Posted by sealight

Windows 8 Dev Preview with Tools has a file bigger than 4GB so it cannot be stored inside a FAT formatted USB stick.
And if we format the USB stick with NTFS the UEFI BIOS wont boot from it.

How can we install "Windows 8 Dev Preview with Tools" UEFI mode using a USB stick?

I have the same issue on a macbook pro early 2011. I used Imagex to split the install.wim into several install.swm files (supported uder windows vista and 7), and move the boot files to the efi\boot folder, but I am getting stuck at the Product key page. All the product keys in the product.ini do not work, as well as the product keys given by microsoft for the reinstall option. I will continue on.

Originally Posted by dragorth

Originally Posted by sealight

Windows 8 Dev Preview with Tools has a file bigger than 4GB so it cannot be stored inside a FAT formatted USB stick.
And if we format the USB stick with NTFS the UEFI BIOS wont boot from it.

How can we install "Windows 8 Dev Preview with Tools" UEFI mode using a USB stick?

I have the same issue on a macbook pro early 2011. I used Imagex to split the install.wim into several install.swm files (supported uder windows vista and 7), and move the boot files to the efi\boot folder, but I am getting stuck at the Product key page. All the product keys in the product.ini do not work, as well as the product keys given by microsoft for the reinstall option. I will continue on.

I now have the installer running through the install, but fails when it tries to write to the mac boot sector. I had to redownload the iso, and resplit the files.

Strange, I remember being able to boot from an NTFS partition. Not a USB stick, but a seperate partition with the installation files on it and installed from there.

Also, shouldn't you be able to skip the Product Key page anyway?

And about failing to write to the mac boot sector, are you sure the drive you installed it in is blank? Win8 would usually write the boot files as soon as you select a drive for installation.

Originally Posted by arkhi

Strange, I remember being able to boot from an NTFS partition. Not a USB stick, but a seperate partition with the installation files on it and installed from there.

Also, shouldn't you be able to skip the Product Key page anyway?

And about failing to write to the mac boot sector, are you sure the drive you installed it in is blank? Win8 would usually write the boot files as soon as you select a drive for installation.

The UEFI spec calls for fat32 partitions being readable, not ntfs. When formated as ntfs, the usb stick would not be detected by the Mac UEFI. I did not use rEFIt, as I have been having issues with lion. (refit does not solve all the problems, I usually get an error when using it, at least from the windows 8 boot options)

I have tried with the drive clean, with the drive pre partitioned according to the Microsoft requirements for uefi, and with OSX installed. In all cases, windows 8 gives me the message "Windows could not update the computer's boot configuration. Instalation cannot proceed."

When searching the log messages located in the $windows.~bt and $windows.~ls (I don't remember which one right this second), I see a general error code, that I forgot to save. When searching online, I found similar error,numbered 81, not the 35 that I was getting that seemed to be driver issues, so I don't know if this one is a driver issue, or what. I have settled on using bootcamp for now, until I feel like working on this again. Bootcamp is working ok, with random system crashes.

I think if I kew a lot more than I do about the microsoft boot environment, I could probably seperate the boot settings out into a fat32 boot partition, and them install from a ntfs partition, but this is seriously becoming a headache. I have worked on this for two weeks, having to wipe and restore the whole system countless times. I now hate the windows install screen. I am wondering if i may be able to use imagex to apply the install image directly, setting up the individual partitions myself, and making it work, I just don't know what files go where in the microsoft system partition, and which files are directly needed for the EFI partition.

I should note, after installing windows the way I described in the earlier post, then getting that error message, when I reboot, I am able to hold down option/alt and boot into the UEFI Boot option, and get a windows error. It says that the recovery tools are not installed, and I must use my disk or usb stick to boot into it.

If anyone has suggestions, I am all ears.

Thanks.

Hmm.. Which mac do you have, by any chance? Not the OS version, but the actual mac product?

Just to add a couple of facts that I know that I'm trying to piece together in regards to your problem:

For Windows:
Can only boot from UEFI through a GPT disk on a UEFI 2.0 64-bit implemented firmware
This is because only the 64-bit versions of Windows are designed to be booted from UEFI

For Macs/Apple:

• *Macs uses EFI 1.1 32-bit mode for most of its OSX Tiger and Lepoard. It was fairly recent (2008-9ish maybe?) that they implemented 64-bit EFI.
  *I can't say for sure if the even newer ones already implemented UEFI 2.0.

Doing some research, this post from Apr 2010 (https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0) stated:

Unfortunately, the 2010 MBP (at least the Core i7 version) seems to still be using EFI 1.1. I checked by booting to rEFIt ... the Mac doesn't use UEFI 2.0 ...

Originally Posted by arkhi

Hmm.. Which mac do you have, by any chance? Not the OS version, but the actual mac product?

Just to add a couple of facts that I know that I'm trying to piece together in regards to your problem:

For Windows:
Can only boot from UEFI through a GPT disk on a UEFI 2.0 64-bit implemented firmware
This is because only the 64-bit versions of Windows are designed to be booted from UEFI

For Macs/Apple:

• *Macs uses EFI 1.1 32-bit mode for most of its OSX Tiger and Lepoard. It was fairly recent (2008-9ish maybe?) that they implemented 64-bit EFI.
  *I can't say for sure if the even newer ones already implemented UEFI 2.0. <-Look up and s

Doing some research, this post from Apr 2010 (https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0) stated:

Unfortunately, the 2010 MBP (at least the Core i7 version) seems to still be using EFI 1.1. I checked by booting to rEFIt ... the Mac doesn't use UEFI 2.0 ...

For brevities sake:

Hardware Overview:


Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B1E
SMC Version (system): 1.69f1
Serial Number (system):
Hardware UUID:
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled

This is an early 2011 model. Deleted the serial and unique for privacy concerns.