James E. LaBarre wrote:
Of course, one could make the sarcastic remark that *not* being able to boot Win8 is not necessarily a bad thing <g>.
OTOH if there are any problems in warranty, the manufacturer may ask you to run some diagnostics under Win8 or whatever the box shipped with.
I'm just wondering how readily Win8 could be converted to a virtual machine image. Other than the potential performance hit from running it inside a VM (and the pain of getting the interface-formerly-known-as-Metro to behave in a VM window), I expect it could do most anything you need it to do in a virtualized environment.
I can't exactly answer that, but this may help: this past June (intentionally before the release of Win8!), I bought an HP desktop that came with Windows 7, and it qualified for the offer of a Win8 upgrade for $15. It didn't /come/ with any recovery discs, but I could burn one set myself and/or buy them from HP. After burning mine, I used gparted from System Rescue CD to shrink the main Windows partition to 120 GB, nuked the recovery partition, and allocated the rest for Linux. Of course I then tried using my recovery discs to create a VM using Linux VirtualBox, but the recovery discs wouldn't allow it. I assume they check the hardware or something. I'm going to try the suggestion earlier in this thread to make a VM out of the installed Win7.
I did register for the Win8 upgrade, and once it was released I paid my $15 + tax and downloaded it. It was an /upgrade/ only, had to be ordered using the system to be upgraded, and couldn't do a standalone install. So -- I'd already created a VM using the free Win8 preview, used that to order the install, and then upgraded that to the released Win8.
BTW a VirtualBox VM includes an option for "EFI Aware". For my Win8 VM, that's usually off and Win8 seems to boot normally. If I set "EFI Aware" to on, booting Win8 offers a completely different startup menu, interesting to play with but doesn't seem to have any option to boot Win8!
Adam _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Dec 5 - SysAdmin Panel Jan 9 - High Performance Computing Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
