A few months back I had built and started using a Hackintosh running OSX 10.7.4 using the guides from www.tonymacx86.com as my base. After a few hiccups where I lost sound , everything has worked very nicely! Prior to installing OSX I had been running the Windows 8 developer preview and had been enjoying playing around with it. So this past week I picked up a new hard drive from Newegg so that I could install Windows 8 on it now that is has been released into the wild.. My full plan was to partition this new 1TB drive into two 500GB chunks so I could install Windows 8 on a piece and use the other for Time Machine in OSX.
I purchased the Windows 8 Pro upgrade so my first step in this process was to install Windows 7 on the new hard drive. After it booted into the installer I partitioned and attempted to install only to be greeted by a nice error saying "Windows cannot be installed, error code 0X8030024". Nice and descriptive eh? I took to Google to figure out the issue and found several solutions:
- Reformat the new hard drive
- Unplug any other hard drive that has an OS on it (my OSX install)
- Pray to the heavens
Since it was the easiest I tried reformatting the drive in the hopes it was that easy. Nope. So I shut everything down, opened the computer up and unplugged the power and SATA cable going to my first hard drive. I left the SATA cable plugged into the motherboard though for what it is worth. I rebooted and waited while Windows unpacked the files yet again... and bingo. I was able to run through the install process perfect.
After that finished I put in the Windows 8 upgrade disc and restarted the computer. After a long pause (about 2-3 minutes) of what I think was supposed to be the Windows 8 logo spinning (it had frozen in position) the installer started. It was easy to walk through and setup and just as quickly as Windows 7 was installed so was Windows 8.
Overall it was a quick process. It took me about an hour to install the new hard drive, debug why W7 wasn't installing, and then to finally install everything. I would say the bulk of that time was waiting for the installers to finish though. So relatively simple. I imagine if you are trying to dual boot from the same hard drive you might run into issues with the bootloader which is why I chose to go for a new hard drive rather than partitioning.