Microsoft has just released a developer preview of their upcoming operating system Windows 8. Users from all over the world can download the preview and install it on their systems. There is only one restriction with regards to the installation: You cannot update an existing copy of Windows, the Windows 8 installation requires a clean install.
I thought it would be perfect for my Acer notebook. It is fairly underpowered by today’s standards, and does not come with a DVD drive which I could use otherwise to install Windows 8.
The only viable option in this case is to install from USB keys, sticks or drives. Installation is a little bit difficulty, as it requires more preparation than just burning an ISO image to disk and putting that ISO into the DVD drive of the computer.
You need an USB key with at least four Gigabytes of free space. The first step is to format the key with the FAT32 file system. This is done by connecting the USB key to the computer, right-clicking its drive letter and selecting Format from the options. The Format window pops up where you need to make sure that Fat32 is the selected file system. Everything else can be left as is.
Wait until the formatting has finished. You now need access to the Windows 8 ISO or DVD. The developer preview is only provided as an ISO image. Check out Windows 8 Download for instructions or download the developer preview right here.
The easiest way to copy Windows 8 to an USB drive and make that drive bootable at the same time is to use Microsoft’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. While designed specifically for Windows 7, it appears to work just fine to create a bootable Windows 8 USB key as well.
Just select the Windows 8 ISO when asked to pick an ISO image from the computer. Then select to copy the contents to an USB drive. The program will copy all files to the drive and make that drive bootable at the same time. You can download the Microsoft tool from here.
Install Windows 8
You plug in your USB key into the computer you want to install Windows 8 on. You need to tell the computer on first start to boot from USB and not from hard drive or another location. This is done in the Bios. You usually enter the Bios with F1, F1, Delete, Esc or another key that is highlighted on the screen on Post. Press that key and look for an entry that says Boot or Boot order and make sure that USB has the highest priority on the system. You can easily repeat the steps if the computer is not booting from USB.
The computer should pick up the installation files on the USB drive automatically and installation should commence.
Windows 8 has the following system requirements:
- 1 Gigahertz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor
- 1 Gigabyte of RAM for 32-bit, 2 Gigabytes of RAM for 64-bit minimum
- 16 Gigabyte hard drive for 32-bit systems, 20 Gigabyte for 64-bit systems
- Direct X 9 graphics card
Update: It is also possible to install Windows 8 by mounting the ISO image directly on another Windows system. The instructions have been posted on Reddit (via):
If you want to install the Windows Developer Preview, but have no blank DVDs or usable thumb drives, fear not. It’s fairly simple. This assumes you are installing the preview on a computer already running Windows, of course.
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- Download the ISO file from Microsoft.
- Mount the ISO using Daemon Tools, Clone Drive, or similar.
- This is important. Do not use the autorun installer. The autorun installer only allows you to upgrade your existing Windows installation and will not allow you to install to a separate hard drive or partition.
- Navigate to the virtual install disc and go to the folder called “sources”.
- Run setup.exe and proceed as if installing Windows Vista or 7.
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Thanks. I didn’t know about this tool from Microsoft. Every other guide I found was walking me through a bunch of command prompts and installing obscure software. This is simple and works perfectly. Thanks again!
The Windows 7 tool doesnt work on Windows 8, what a shame
and i sat through a 3 hour Keynote explaining the backwards compatibility
this doesnt work for me
I have a dual-boot with Windoes 7 and Ubuntu 11.04 but I wanted to install it on-top of my Ubuntu partition. Is there any way to install it without messing with my grub? Or can I install Windows’s own MBR to load both Windows 7 and 8?
Windows 8 will recognize other Windows partitions on your drive, and automatically add them to its bootloader. I know because I did the same thing, except I was deleting a Snow Leopard partition.
Perfect, thanks for the information.
I used the Windows 7 USB/DVD tool and it got to the end, but then came up with an error saying Bootsect hadn’t worked.
I downloaded Bootsect and tried to get it working, but when I booted from USB is said NTLDR not found. Is specified that rather than bootmgr. Any ideas?
I had the same bootsect issue as AJ
I get the following error when I run the Windows 7 USB Tool and select the win8 ISO — any suggestions?
—————————
Invalid ISO File
—————————
The selected file is not a valid ISO file. Please select a valid ISO file and try again.
—————————
OK
—————————
Chris that happened to me. It happened because it didn’t download all the way. Try redownloading the iso.
Thats because your ISO file is corrupted. Check if it got correct size? I think your download was not complete.
Reran the USB/DVD Tool on my x64 system and bootsect worked fine
I am going to put this on a new 2 tb hd just to experiment with. this drive is not my main drive. can I still install it on that drive?
I am running into an error when trying to install Windows 8 through a USB stick. It says a required CD-ROM/DVD driver cannot be found or something to that effect and won’t let me go any further than that. Any thoughts?
Sid,
I’m getting the same error, I tried installing to a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop and a Dell OptiPlex 755 desktop and both get that same driver prompt that I cannot get past. I spent an hour looking for a CD/DVD driver for my hardware only to find out there are no drivers needed, it is plug and play since Windows XP. I am guessing this is a misleading error message, it must be looking for something else and not finding it. I’m about to call it quits with this thing.
Thanks SW! Ya I’ve pretty much given up with this version as well. I guess just gonna have to wait it out till a beta is available where these kinda kinks are fixed.
Sid
Usb stick wont work because it thinks it as CD drive, and therefore wont find driver for it, burn it as DVD
I’m also receiving the bootsect error. Basically, at the end of Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool wizard I receive an error stating the bootsect couldn’t be loaded. It’s because I’m trying to create a bootable USB from a 64-bit Windows on a 32-bit Win7 install.
Chased the forums. Found bootsect.exe. No friggin’ idea what to do with it. None of the forums really explain what to do with said bootsect.exe.
I’ve downloaded and am now trying unetbootin instead. I’ll let you know how I go but assume that silence means success…..
FML…….
I just wasted an ENTIRE even mucking around with this bootsect.exe error when trying to create a bootable USB on my 32-bit bootcamp install of Win7. After FINALLY getting a bootable USB using Unetbootin, I rebooted into OSX, opened up Parallels 7, tried to install a new OS via the USB and realised that all I had to do was point to the raw ISO I downloaded.
ON PARALLELS YOU DON’T EVEN NEED TO BURN TO DVD OR CREATE A BOOTABLE DVD.
Damn it. If only I had known that before now. Ah well….learn from your mistakes. Your frustrating, time-consuming mistakes..
Grrrrr!
Haha, bet you were still relived after all.
Very relieved. I was glad I could finally get it done :) Strangely though, the install of Win8 on Parallels runs terribly slowly. I even gave it 2GB of RAM, 2 cores and 256MB graphics, but it still ran like a dog’s breakfast. Must be an issue with Parallels….
doesn’t work with the windows 7 tool
Windows 8 is going to be a game changer for sure.. but so far it suites very well for tablets and not for PC’s. When i have it on PC it simply reminds me Windows 7 except the START page.
this is only devoluper preview, may me they upgrade the desktop UI later.
I think no need to format manually as tool will take care of it
hello everybody,
i have a problem. Please try to help me out. I had a usb 2.0 pen drive through which i was able to make pen drive bootable through this software. But recently i lost my pen drive and bought usb 3.0 pen drive. The problem is i m not able to make usb 3.0 pen drive bootable through software. Any Solutions ? or we cannot make usb 3.0 bootable ????
after completing this, can the usb drive be used for other purposes??
Yes Mids, that shouldn’t be a problem. You’ll just need to reformat the USB drive when you are done. Do you know how to reformat a drive?
yes, it’s the same process as formatting…isn’t it??
copying files in USB is being stuck at 95%. what should i do??
Maybe test your usb drive for errors?
I’m on Linux, so I’ll try this on another computer. I wish it explained the differences between burning an ISO to disk and an ISO to USB. It’d make it easier for some of us that can’t use that program.
By the way, small typo:
“You usually enter the Bios with F1, F1, Delete, Esc or another key…”
Should that be F12?
I followed these steps on a Windows 7 Pro 32-bit virtual machine running in Oracle VirtualBox on a 64-bit Ubuntu 11.04 host. I used the Windows8 Developer Preview with Tools iso.
It worked great the first time. Did not need to format the stick (a Patriot 32GB USB 3.0 stick) before running the tool; the tool formatted for me.
I’m booting from the stick as I type on a junk machine on my bench so I’m not anticipating any problems (with the boot & install, anyway).
Thanks Martin,
danielkr
Glad that it worked out for you ;)
I solved my problem posted earlier. The drive _must_ be formatted as NTFS. The FAT format doesn’t cut it.
By the way, unetbootin works just as well as the Microsoft tool, plus it’s cross-platofrm. So any Mac/Linux users can use that instead.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
I found a solution to the No-CDRom Drivers issue. It’s kind of a pain, but, it worked.
I installed windows 7 64-Bit on my Laptop first, just a clean install, no updates, software or anything else. I created the Windows 8 USB disk and ran the install from there. It needed 20GB’s of free space on the C drive so if you are going to partition out a drive, make sure you give it 20GB’s more than you need.
After that I just let the install run. It was a long process installing 2 OS’s, but it worked.
that really worked…. thanks a lot, i’ve put it on my laptop and it did work….
great…
I have a really frustrating problem. After creating the stick with no errors and stuff whenn I want to boot from it , it just says “an error occured while reading disk” or something like this just after BIOS screen. Any ideas? (Yes im booting from my pendrive what have all files and added bootsector, formatted in NTFS— done with the win7 install usb/dvd tool)
Maybe a corrupt file?
I did it on another pendrive with same stuff (excluding i used the manual way with cmd to make a bootable usb stick) and it woked until the time when i have to select the partition i want to setup now it says : Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. What should i do now?
Boot stick show up windows developer then remains blocked
One problem with this is that i see you chose to format the usb drive to FAT32 filsystem.
The Win 8 64-bit dev edition i downloaded from Microsoft has a file called install.wim thats roughly 4.5 GB in size, and FAT32 will not accept a file that big.
So I am going to try formatting the usb drive with NTFS and see how it goes.
It’s relay good……!!!!!
instead of a usb flash drive, can you just use an external hard drive?
no need of usb or external HD for installing win8 Developer preview
just mount the iso file on a virtual drive using ISO or other software and then simply click on the ‘setup’ file to start installation ……..::))
:) It would not help if you want to overwrite the current OS coz virtual drive will not exist when that software which has created the virtual drive would be of no use, as current OS system files and folders would be moved to “windows.old” like folder, and this, also would be of no use…