Just starting to recover from the loss of my Live Spaces blog – my site there was never moved to WordPress as it was supposed to be… I don’t know who to blame for the failure, so I’ll just kick myself for putting the conversion off until the last minute…
I spent the day today bringing up and playing with the Windows 8 Developer Preview on my Acer convertible tablet. I’m posting this from within Win8, and loving the new interface!! So, how was it that I managed to do the install, considering the hard drive I put in wasn’t bootable, and there’s no DVD drive in the little machine. Hint: it wasn’t hard!!
Here’s the basic rundown of the steps I followed:
- Downloaded the Win8 preview .iso image (4.8GB for 64-bit Windows – including developer tools) from http://dev.windows.com
- Inserted a new hard drive into the Acer 1420p tablet (the PDC 2009 multi-touch machine) – which I’d previously upgraded to 4GB memory. I switched hard drives so I could get back to my Windows 7 developer environment on the machine – I use it for multi-touch phone app dev.
- Downloaded the Windows7-USB-DVD-Download-Tool-Installer from http://wudt.codeplex.com
- On my regular laptop, ran the WUDT tool against the Win8 .iso image, and created a bootable USB drive (high speed 8GB USB stick)
- Put the USB drive into the Acer and turned it on. Hit F2 to enter BIOS setup, and set the default boot device to USB HDD, saved and rebooted
- Formatted the hard drive from within Win8 setup, and let it run. It actually took longer to get the bootable USB drive working than to install Windows 8!
- Took about 10 minutes to do the initial load and reboot, about 4 minutes to load devices and reboot, and about 10 minutes to do the initial manual configuration
- Note that on the first reboot, I went back into BIOS setup and switched the default boot device back to the hard disk
That was it! Since this morning, I’ve been learning how to navigate a fully touch-enabled version of Windows, while trying to ignore the physical keyboard. It’s actually pretty cool!