Windows 8 install shift f10

I would like to install Windows 8 in the same way is that possible? TIA Yaz. I followed the instructions above and installed on my PDC09 laptop. Seems to be working like a charm. This seems to be a pretty good system to use for this since it is touch capable.

It's not going to break any speed records with a Celeron Processor and only 2 GB of RAM, but it is running so far and the performance seems bearable. September 19, Mario P. I followed this guide and created a growing 60gb VHD.

However when I come to install it, I get the error, can't install to the selected location. There is plenty of space for the 60gb VHD, and its attached fine and shows. Anyone any ideas as to why this error occurs?

Thanks for the instructions. It worked exactly as you have described. Satu Thundathil. So have this working with a Lenovo W Works great, curious can I also boot the same VHD from within Windows 7 without screwing anything up? Keith Franklin. Thanks, Scott! Worked like a dream.

I messed up a little though and this is why. I'll add a notice, maybe this will save a couple of minutes to the other.

Typical solution suggested by Burke didn't work for me. Anyways, thanks a lot, dude! I did't know you can patch the boot sector! The UFD booted nicely into the Windows 8 setup.

Heck, I expected a re-install or a quick update when it finished with complete fresh install and renaming of existing Windows folder. Okay, I went further, waited until the reboot and The Windows Developer Preview label appeared for a minute on the screen and That has driven me mad because I couldn't get out of this error since MSFT decided as it had been before to set zero-second delay for the Windows 8 boot record in the boot menu. By the way, any clue how to resolve this problem?

I got this I can't reproduce the exact message : Cannot create a virtual disk. Virtual disk should require a NTFS disk that should not be compressed or encrypted. Seems like it did not! But it worked! Once I did so, the diskpart created virtual disk with no problem. After I created a new blank VHD, setup ran flawless. For anyone else who, like me, didn't know for lack of support for NTFS compression, please be aware that "Using compressed or encrypted VHDs for native boot. I have remnants of obsolete Windows 8 boot records there that are not needed any longer.

If there's no other way to edit it but using bcdedit, do I understand it right that I should use the bcdedit from under the Windows 8 environment? What if I run it under Windows Server R2 session? I think that would quirck the boot menu completely and brick the boot, am I right? Thank you everybody! Alex Sucasaca Pacsi. September 20, If you go through setup all of this magic happens for you. Brian Keller. Wondering if someoen can help me.

Then I install to it following the instructions. My problem is when I want to go back to Windows 7. Why is that? See the setup log files for more information. Loaded the driver for the RAID controller manually and refreshed the drive list, but no luck. Ammaar Limbada. September 21, Scott, Tried to follow the instructions and created the VHD on the G: drive on my machine, which happens to be a secondary partition on the main and only physical drive of the laptop.

In your instructions, the D: drive you used just seemed to be available Adam Haile. September 22, I got this message before being able to select a drive to install on like a few others.

Gary Davis Webguild. Rachael Romito. September 23, It is initialised, 60 Gb Dynamic, formatted and set as active and shows in explorer as drive T: so can anyone please help by explaining how do I get the preview onto the VHD. I do have Virtual Clone Drive if that helps. When I get to the first re-boot, I'm getting a 0Xc error - Windows cannot verify the digital signature for the file.

The file is Winload. Anyone have any suggestions? Richard McEnery. Beware if you have a dual boot system. The installer installed the preview in my vhd, but obliterated my linux boot partition, which now contains a windows bootloader only. September 24, I'm having a problem installing W8 from USB. September 26, Superb Tutorial! Blew out my mind, and worked like a champ! A Fan. I can honestly say, I do not like what I've seen, too much glitz and bloat.

Looks like another attempt at XP Media Edition, May come over better when more touch screen devices become standard. Time will tell. September 27, September 28, Instructions worked perfectly! Even the Gigabyte motherboard USB boot instructions were spot on! Eventually I will need to try the dismounting and removal process. I'm kinda curious how the bootloader will react. I would expect to be able to revert back to the Win7 bootloader, right?

Maybe there will be a write-up for that when the time comes ;- Thanks! Michael Mueller. September 30, I got this to work on my HP tm2 convertable laptop first time - no problems.

Multi-touch works. Metro works good on it. Now all I need to figure out is how to get the screen to rotate and disable the touchpad when I flip it into tablet mode. Greg Johnson. October 02, You are a God among men. Had tried the setup by using the default instructions with no success. Your instructions worked bang on the first time. And, thank you for being you. I typically find anything you post be be extremely helpful. Glenn Walker. October 03, Check this out.

I am successfully using this now with my win7. October 05, Shift-F10 does not bring up the command prompt in setup. Anyone else run into this problem? Paul Fountain. October 06, I've been running my win 7 machine with VHD since your first post. Thanks for getting me through the developer preview. I think that stands for dual layer. Holds 8GB. I follow the excellent guide, but during install I get the following error, when the system reboots: Your PC needs to be repaired The application or operating system couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors.

Booting from install USB and running repair does not help eihter. Anyone else experience this? October 13, My coworker gets the credit for this Maybe that's obvious to everyone I think it's very cool! When Microsoft said they were designing from chipset to user experience Cory Plotts. One other comment. I changed my default OS on boot to be Windows 7 and it reverted to the old, original Windows 7 bootloader. Later, when I wanted to show off the shiny, new Windows 8 bootloader to a colleague, I reset the default OS to boot However, upon doing so, it only booted Windows 8 and didn't offer me a choice to boot to Windows 7.

Just thought I would share October 17, Giorgio Camparsi. October 24, I'm struggling on selecting the new VHD during installation. I created it on my C drive but when I try to select it, it errors saying it can't find it. I following your method with a bootable usb stick. Any thoughts?? October 31, Colin Dale.

December 07, Hey does any one know if there is a way to boot windows 8 off a USB key? Lucas Kleiss. January 09, I get the same issue as Thomas S, everything goes smoothly until I reboot and get the following error: Your PC needs to be repaired The application or operating system couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors.

January 11, See the System Event Log for more information. I'm running Windows 7 64bit, bitlock disabled. If you have a driver floppy disk, cd, dvd, or usb flash drive please insert it now.

No device drivers were found. Make sure that the installation media contains the correct drivers, then click ok. January 14, And sometimes blood. January 18, Hi, maybe I'm missing something but if you are effectively forced into changing the bootloader anyway what is the point of using a VHD at all?

Why not just create a new partition on your HDD and install direct to that, ie a normal proper dual-boot setup? January 21, If your "System Reserved" partition is low you might have to use something like partition wizard to buy some space for that sandwiched reserved partition. Jerry Odom. January 22, January 27, What can I do? February 01, Hey, thanks so much!

I could not get this to work through win's gui partition manager. In the end I used the command line and it worked perfect. I need to get over my command line fears. Worked perfect for me in the end.

Seth Attaway. February 05, Hi Scott, Might be worth posting a note about some rules around where bootable VHD files should go, as per the technet docs here. The VHD should go on the same physical disk that Windows 7 is installed on it'll be the one that has the "System Reserved" partition on it.

The problem here is that your windows 7 boot sector does not get upgraded, or have the Windows8 entry added to it, and you only get to boot the OS which lives on the highest priority boot drive in your system. In my case, the drive I put the VHD on happened to be the highest priority one although it had never been bootable before so I didn't realise until then , and I was left wondering why I couldn't boot Windows 7.

Just a trap for new players. Guy Sherman. February 08, I am unable to follow the instructions through to completion. I was able to create and attach the vdisk, however when I try to install Windows 8 to it I get the following: Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table.

Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu. The last message was mentioned in the article above, but the first message was not. Unfortunately I am unable to find a solution at this time. Jonathan Sampson. Solution If you're encountering the following: Windows cannot be installed to this disk.

Once this is done, recreate the volume on the drive, and proceed to attempt your install again. This worked for me. February 13, Great work! Now another research left to do. How to remove the Win8 from your system now.

It looks terribly simple that just booting from Windows 7 and deleting the VHD file could solve the matter, but I think its going to be more tedious than this. I haven't tried it yet, want to hear it from you first. I don't think the Win8 boot loader will magically disappear afterwards.

And since theres no Boot. Faraz Azhar. Make sure you are deleting Windows 8 and not your boot info for Windows 7! Thanks Scott. It worked. But I tried a different software It had a graphic interface so I simply selected Windows 8 from it and removed it. Works fine! Checked by restarting and also checked in System Properties system booting section. February 19, Can you use a usb hard disk instead of the USB key? You were using a 16gb usb key and i want to know will a external hard disk perform the same role?

Andrew Mc Glone. February 23, Please tell me a solution how to restore my w8. February 28, For example, I finished playing with Windows 8, and I want to have only Windows 7 and automatically boot to it - like before the installation of Windows 8? Reader - You can run MsConfig. Then you can delete the VHD. February 29, Do I go back into 7, switch the default boot option and then reformat the VHD and follow original instructions?

Matthew Lerner. March 01, Follow the exact same procedure, after mounting the vdisk, i formated my VDisk it in the setup screen, and then install CP on it. Works perfectly. Alas, no success. Everything went OK until the reboot. Windows 7 booted instead of Win8. Fixed that with Bcdedit. However upon choosing Win8 I always end up with System Repair. Christophe Geers. March 03, Thanks for the article. Used it to install Win8CP just now. Everything went fine! Someone wrote earlier that you have to use the same physical drive that the one with Win I can still boot to both Win7, and Win8CP.

Thanks for this wonderful post, especially the screenshots! Installed Windows 8 CP March 04, Nice on. Tried it with a spare PC with Hyper-V on just playstuff and it works without a hitch.

March 05, When installing everything is going good until I have to press Shift-F10 which does not bring up the console command-prompt any ideas as to what is wrong. March 06, I had a similar experience as others, after all said and done it boots to the windows repair. I can however choose F12 at boot, select the partition for the VHD and boot into windows 8 no problem.

I just can't get it to work with the boot loader. I suppose it has something to do with the options selected in the boot loader. March 07, I followed this guide and everything worked great, thanks! Thanks Scott for the useful Guide! Will similar approach work for Win8 VHD? But when VHD is booted from an empty drive without Windows installed on it, how it can happen? Then Winload. Thanks Scott for the reply. Is this ok or would it be better if I create another partition and stored the VHD there?

March 08, Eduardo Most often such errors result from corrupted BCD entry i. I still ask Scott to fid out with Virtualization Team, how VHD is mounted during boot, when booting from an empty drive with no Windows installed.

It looks like Bootmgr also acts as device driver similar to Grub. March 09, Blog Saays. For people with this error "Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. March 10, Scott I installed this without even thinking will it erase my files? I just tried this with the Consumer Preview, and it worked great! Posting from Win8 now! I created the VHD on my storage drive exactly as in the tutorial, and the bootloader magic just worked.

A couple notes: I created the VHD in the Disk Management snap-in, but after creating and attaching it, I didn't see an option to create a partition. Feedback will be sent to Microsoft: By pressing the submit button, your feedback will be used to improve Microsoft products and services.

Privacy policy. For example, if you receive the error message: Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This option lets you keep the existing partition style. You can preserve your data and convert the drive using the MBR2GPT tool , or you can choose to reformat the drive using the instructions below. Reformatting will erase all the data on the drive. This version of BIOS was developed in the s and provides compatibility to a variety of older equipment and network configurations, and requires a drive that uses the MBR drive format.

It's also difficult to set up more than four partitions. The issues below will prevent the installation of Windows 8 and 8. The lack of clear error messages actually makes an EFI installation seem impossible, despite the EFI boot loader being present on the Windows disc. However, the fixes are fairly straightforward once you understand the issues. The first task is to make some free space available, and then create a new NTFS partition for Windows to install to size should be at least 20GB.

Note: On a Mac, the boot manager can be accessed by holding the alt key during startup. Start the Windows installation using your preferred media, select the custom install option, then continue on to the partition selection screen and select the empty NTFS partition created previously. With a single non-hybrid GPT disk, Windows should install without complaint. Note: While you can use the installer to format or delete existing partitions, using it to create a new partition from free space will likely create additional system partitions which you may prefer not to have littering your disk.