How did you setup your Win 8 install?

[joshyc5]

Primary OS, loving it so far.

 

[Trev0r09]

I *was* going to try dual booting Windows 8CP side by side with my existing Windows 7 x64 partition, but right now I'm running my laptop with a 120 GB OCZ Vertex3 SSD (about 66 GB free on it, OS + apps, which should be plenty), but I'm concerned that the Win8 partition would end up misaligned (starting sector offset of the partition won't be divisible by 4096), which could cause major performance and wear issues on the SSD.

Besides, it's true: it really is hard going back to the old spinner drive technology, after running with one of these things for a few months, as I have been. They're just so sick st00pid FAST!

Here's a screen scrape of an ATTO disk drive benchmark run I did a couple days ago:



516 MB/s writes, 557 MB/s reads - crazy

 

[whs]

I think you are looking at the wrong nums. The 4K nums count for the OS - and even those do not mean a lot because the OS does not R/W a lot. All the performance comes from the 0.1ms access time.

And if you make a second partition for Win8 on the SSD, you need not worry about alignment. It will be well aligned because it is MBs (even GBs) away from the beginning of the disk. Convert that to K-bytes and you can always divide by 4.

On my laptop, I run Win8 on a 90GB OCZ Vertex in double boot. But I really do not like it too much because you need to go thru the BIOS twice to get to Win7. On my desktop I put it into Virtual Box (also on a SSD). That works a lot better and I can keep running Win7 and Win8 in paralell all day long.

 

[loquacious]

Dual boot here

 

[carlos28355]

I installed as a dual boot using 2 separate drives, first unplugging the Windows 7 SSD drive then installing Windows 8 on the other formatted spinner drive. After Windows 8 installation I reattached the Windows 7 drive.

Only drawback is I do not have a boot order menu but have to use Bios boot order menu options (F8) on my Asus mobo to boot into either Windows 7 or Windows 8.

As others have alluded to the installer will let you choose a separate partition on the same drive but not a separate drive.

Not sure why you could not install on separate drive. I have four 500 gig HDD's and it is installed on the second thus I was able to set it as a dual boot on two different drives.

Do you have a guide for this? I tried dual boot on seperate hdd...i dont want to have to change in bios to pick the OS i want...not sure what im doing wrong here...installed win7x64 on one hdd...then installed win8cpx64 on another hdd..boots straight to windows 7 with no option...

 

[whs]

I guess you have 2 options:

1. you can install on a seperate drive (internal or external) by disconnecting all other drives. Then you switch the boot order via the BIOS. That is extremely convenient and dows not mess up your bootmgr. On one system I used to run Win8 DP from an eSata drive like this - Win8 CP I put into Virtual Box which is optimal for playing with it.

2. you install on a seperate drive and leave all drives connected. Then the installer will put the Win8 BCD into your current bootmgr and you have a double boot. I have done a dual boot on another system (but on the same SSD). But it is a real pain. My boot time increased 4-fold for Win8 and 10-fold for Win7 (as compared to when Win7 was alone). I will dismantle this arrangement and put it on an external drive.

 

[fafhrd]

I have a multi-booting system - XP on one disk, and Windows 7 x86,Windows7 x64, Windows 8 CTP x86 and Windows 8 CTP x64, as well as Windows 2000, and various Windows Embedded and Thin PC installations each on their own partitions.

Because these partitions are limited in size to about 15GB, I could not use the Windows 8 setup program which requires at least 20GB to proceed, so I used Imagex.exe to apply the install.wim for Windows 8 from the .iso download mounted as a virtual DVD drive using Virtual CloneDrive (no need in Windows 8 - mounting .isos is a welcome built-in feature)

The (elevated) command was

>imagex /apply R:\sources\install.wim 1 J:

where R: was the virtual DVD drive, and J: was the partition I had just formatted - it previously contained a Windows 7 embedded installation, and I did not need to edit the BCD - it just booted straight into the new OS from the old boot menu entry. If it has not been used for an OS before, I would have used BCDBOOT as follows:

>bcdboot J:\windows /s c:

This just adds an entry to the boot menu on the C: drive where the boot folder resides - when Windows 8 boots, it takes the C: drive letter for its own.

Imagex is very fast - takes about 10 minutes to apply the image to the partition, then it takes another 20 minutes for Windows to prepare the installation.

Imagex.exe comes with the WAIK - the Windows Automated Installation Kit, or the Windows Embedded Standard Toolkit or Image Builder downloads from Microsoft - but they are all huge multi GB downloads for a tiny little executable.
Download: Windows® AIK for Windows® 7 - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details
Download Windows Embedded Standard 7 | Product Information and Trials

Imagex.exe may already be hiding on your PC if your OEM has a recovery partition on your disk. It may be hidden within the boot.wim image which contains a WinPE installation, under sources\PETools\ or on some other path. If you have 7-Zip File Manager, it is easy to find and extract stuff buried in nested archive formats like this. Download

I have recently come across SmartWIM from SmartDeploy OS Deployment Products which seems to be functionally similar to Imagex. It is a free download for personal use, and uses the Microsoft wimgapi.dll Windows Imaging technology, either from the command prompt or in a scripted environment. It is available after a short registration form is completed and is a tiny download, so it might be more convenient than the Microsoft download.

 

[SIW2]

Interesting you got it to work .

I always install that way.

I tried to install wcp like that also - no go.

In the end I had to resort to installing from the dvd.

 

[fafhrd]

Interesting you got it to work .

I always install that way.

I tried to install wcp like that also - no go.

In the end I had to resort to installing from the dvd.

How odd! I have never had a problem with Imagex since I started to use it about a year ago.

There are a few variables at play here. There are 32- and 64-bit versions of Imagex.exe and Wimgapi.dll for a start. Then there are probably older and newer versions of Imagex.exe knocking around too.

Here are the details of the versions I had no apparent problems with:



And yeah, I still use Excel 97 (and Word 97)

Postscript
Having now read all 11 pages in this thread - it is fairly obvious that the Windows 8 boot on my machine is just chainloaded from the Windows 7 bootloader already installed - so no 'return to bios, reboot from 7' issues for me. Just the windows 7 boot menu and straight in. It also means I am not getting the full experience :lol - but I intend to install on an old Packard Bell machine from 2001 that I found dumped to see how retro 8 will go.

 

[husein]

64 bit Dual boot

 

[almondman]

I have a Dell XPS 9100 That came with Win 7 on drive C (2TB). I then installed XPSP3 on drive d (2TB). I partitioned my 3rd drive (2TB) with two 1TB partitions R and E. I downloaded the Win 8 iso and extracted the files from the iso to a folder on drive R. I then, with XP running, clicked on the setup.exe in the sources folder on drive R so I could install win 8 to dreve E, and after a couple of minutes got a message about an unexpected error about the installation sources not being accessable. I tried a couple more times with the same result. I then booted into Win 7 SP1 and tried the same thing. And to my suprise the installation went pretty smoothly. When I finished I had a new boot menu with ALL 3 Systems available !!!

So now I have a Tripple Boot system. I have Easy BCD and iReboot on all 3 systems and am able to boot between the systems with iReboot.

 

[Michael]

I was practically given a corrupted laptop ($20.) because of a bad virus and no recovery disc or partition.

Windows 8 loaded without a hitch, except now I too am having iTunes troubles.

 

[Frank1]

I installed mine on my desktop where I have a second internal drive that I use for backup. I created a new volume on that drive of 100GB. l then installed it on that new volume with no problem. When I start my machine now I have the option of booting into windows 7 or 8. When I installed it I chose Custom Install which gave me the choice of which drive I wanted to install it on.

 

[Digitaltor]

Clean install on a spare Acer Aspire ZA3 A0751h netbook, 2GB ram 230gb HDD, WXGA LED LCD HD screen with the Windows 8 native 1366 x 786 res, took less than 20mins without any problems... ...or so I thought until I tried to update the Intel GMA 500, the driver wouldn't install via auto update, legacy driver installed via device mgr all looked good until black screen started, had to remove Intel GMA 500 and run with Microsoft basic display adapter which runs at 1024 x 768 look ok and Metro is working fine, but could be a lot better... any ideas on the black screen??



Cloud Services, Office 365, Windows Intune
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[jrvmbust]

I use Windows Consumer Preview and Windows Developer Preview is one machine. No flaws at all.

 

[HDbooter]

Portable multiboot USB v2.0 external HDD

Windows 8 CP To Go: boot in about 42 seconds
Windows 8 CP nativeboot vhd Uncompress 5.5 Gb: boot in about 32 seconds
Windows 8 CP nativeboot vhd with 2 Gb system build: boot in about 39 seconds
Windows 8 CP nativeboot vhd with 1 Gb system build: boot in about 34 seconds
Windows 7 nativeboot vhd: boot in about 31 seconds
Windows XP pro (usboot)

 

[SmartEyeball]

Dual boot /W8 onto a RAID 0 partition.

 

[area 66]

28 seconds to boot my Windows 7, on my Intel 520 SSD, and I have to ctrl + alt +del and type my password since it's on a domain. And after this 28 seconds it's ready to go, I can open right away something.

40 seconds to boot Windows 8 on a WD 500 gb black, so better keep your money for a SSD instead of a new OS

 

[kasonwilliams]

How did you set up your windows 8 install?

All I was download windows 7 from the Google play store,and also windows 8 forum.

 

[prplxr]

First installed CP x86 as a guest os in VMWare, fell in love and made a clean install of CP x64 on my primary laptop. I'm lovin' it!