I tried to install Windows 8 Developer Preview on my Lenovo W520 laptop as a VHD boot. All seemed to go well following the same process as for windows 7. I got a nice new blue Window 8 boot partition choice screen (which went back to the Windows 7 DOS like one after I made Windows 7 my default partition).
If I selected Windows 8 it tried to but but ended up with the error
‘Windows could not complete the installation. To install windows on this computer restart the installation’
No more info than that, I suspect it does not like VHD boot. But I don’t have time to dig now, more later I am sure……
[Update 15 Sep 2011]
My colleague Robert Hancock could not wait to try the Windows 8 bits on his identical Lenovo to mine that dual boots between Windows 7 and Windows 2008. He took a slightly different route which worked.
- On his Server 2008 boot created a new virtual machine in Hyper-V and Installed Windows 8
- Exported the virtual machine
- Booted back into Windows 7
- Attached exported VHD in Disk Management (VHD was on the d: drive)
- Ran the following command C:WindowsSystem32bcdboot I:Windows where I represented the drive letter for the attached VHD
- Ran bcdedit with no parameters to verify the boot entry had been added
- Rebooted my machine and verified ‘Windows Developer Preview’ appeared. Started up the boot and verified windows 8 ran correctly.
The only other thing was he commented his C: drive was not BitLocker’ed. My post about problems with BitLocker prompted me to suspend this before trying the Windows 8 install.