Today I decided to have a glimpse at Windows 8 Developer Preview. My first choice of a virtual machine was VirtualBox. So I configured the box and fired up the installation of Windows 8 Developer Preview after downloading it (for a link check the bottom of the post). At some point I got the HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED error. Nice blue screen with a sad smilie on:

Windows 8 Developer Preview HAL Error

It seems there are some workarounds to get around this error but I was kinda too lazy for that. So I downloaded vmWare Workstation 8, which is supposed to be able to run Windows 8 Developer Preview. After downloading it, I created a new virtual machine, fired it up and tried to install windows. Too my surprise (not) installation of the image ended with “Cannot Read the <ProductKey> settings from the unattend answer file” and the machine kept rebooting itself. It seems the problem is the easy install function. You can disable it by choosing following option:

Disable Easy Install

After you did that you can choose Settings -> CD/DVD(IDE) and tell vmWare to use an ISO file:

Now whats left is to give it another try, so I booted up the VM and voila, Windows 8 installed smoothly and it runs:

Now its time for some testing.

Summary:

If you have trouble installing Windows 8 Dev Preview, you can leave a comment and I`ll try to help you figure it out. There`ll be more blog posts about Windows 8 soon, so stay in touch.