Finally got to install windows 8 on my Lenovo ThinkPad X220 Tablet. As I was not interested in partitioning my drives, I was looking for an alternate solution. My colleague emailed me one link - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GuideToInstallingAndBootingWindows8DeveloperPreviewOffAVHDVirtualHardDisk.aspx
In this blog, Scott Hanselman has provided a very good view of how to create a virtual hard drive (vhd) where Windows 8 can be installed on. This VHD does not need Virtual PC or Hyper-V and sits in the file system on primary Windows operating system. I did see some issues following what Scot H. has provided. I will go thru the details below. The blog taught me new things, like DISKPART, which I never knew of before. I did not want to partition the HDD as I want to have the flexibility of moving out of the preview with ease. Scott Hanselman’s blog showed me the solution.
So what I did was to follow the steps mentioned in the blog, but I hit a wall. In Step 2, I had created the VHD file in my C drive. Location was C:\win8vhd\win8.vhd. So, in step 4, I entered the DISKPART command as select vdisk file=c:\win8vhd\win8.vhd This threw an error of “system cannot find the file or path specified”. I spent some time pulling out what ever hair was left on my scalp and trying to figure out how to install Windows 8 on VHD – entered various combinations to the file path in the DISKPART command. went back to good ol’ internet and found a link to “http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd535816.aspx” provide by one Antonio in the comments for Scott’s blog. Reading thru that, I came across the DISKPART command “list disk”. This command lists all the disks. When I ran it, I saw that my Windows 7 C drive was listed as the 6th drive. So from DISKPART command prompt, I entered F: and hit {Enter} and got to the file location of my Windows 7 C drive. Eureka!! So in my command for Scott’s 4th step, I entered F:\win8vhd\win8.vhd and what I saw brought a big smile on my face. Rest of the installation was very simple and the screens are very friendly to help all understand how to proceed with install. Very few screens and if I remember them – License terms, Network selection, Windows Live ID signup/login, sending info to MS and auto update options screens. That was it. Then it showed me the default UI for Windows 8.
One of the tile was for Desktop and when I clicked on it, it showed me the old desktop UI of Windows (similar to Windows 7). It has Visual Studio 11, Expression Blend and some games. Next few days, I will spend playing around with Windows 8 and will provide more details on what I see.
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