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I've been unable to install the preview. I made a separate partition, but it tells me that I have a EFI system and need a GPT disc. So I tried converting it from MBR to GPT, but still got the same error. Had to delete the entire disc to do this by the way. The ironic part is that now I couldn't install Windows 7 BECAUSE I had a GPT disc, so I didn't risk trying to install Windows 8 first by formatting through the installation program, in case it would refuse to instal win 7. Anyone have a clue? Oh and of course I booted from the dvd.
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Not sure what you did wrong or why its not working but heres the guide I followed to install the 64bit with developer tools.
1. I used easeus partition master free edition to shrink my windows 7 partition and created 60gb of unallocated space. By the way my windows 7 partition shows up as basic mbr and is in the ntfs format.
2. I downloaded the 64 dev preview.
3. Since no dvd's I had are 4.9gb I downloaded windows 7 usb dvd tool
4. Then ran it and pointed it to the dev preview iso and then to my flash drive(which had to be erased)
5. Booted from the usb and installed the preview onto the new partition and haven't had a single problem dual booting both.
Thanks, but I did pretty much the same. Except that I downloaded the version without the dev tools that was 3.6 gb, and burned that to a dvd and booted from it.
Oh and I did screw up my first partitioning attempt, I used the built in tool to make a partition and ignored the warning telling me that it would be converted to dynamic, making it impossible to install Windows on the disc. I had to reformat the disc too revert it, I did this when I reinstalled Windows 7. So I don't see how this could have anything too do with this issue. My disc shows up as basic MBR now as well.
Anyway I'll try again later when I get home from work.
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I reinstalled my windows 7.. divide the hd into two.25gb each..after that. I make bootable usb flash using wintobootic. Flawless installed windows 8 in 25gb partition. Window 8 will prompt u to choose OS when booting.
hey
i just put a extra hd in my laptop put windows 8 on that one when it comes on it ask's me if i want to boot 7 or 8
This has probably been addressed but here goes....
I partitioned a drive for W8, called it drive P. Loaded W8 and ran it, worked nicely and wanted to go install gag. Once I installed gag I ran W8 again and it worked ok again. Then I wanted to use my W7 and tried to get to it, and for some reason I have to go through the Windows bootloader. Where you get a dos style screen and have to choose between W7 or W8 (keep in mind this is after you make your selection using gag), I choose W7. It got stuck on the loading screen (the one where it ways "windows 7" below the windows icon. Had to turn off my comp cause it wouldn't get past that screen.
Then I went into W8, which loaded fine and opened the disk management. It said that my main hard drive partition which has W7 and all of my files on it was completely empty and no longer named the "C" drive. Now my drive with W8 was called the "C" drive.
So I ran uninstalled/reinstalled GAG and somehow I got back to W7 with all of my files there.
But im afraid to run W8 again since I feel like W8 needs to run on the C drive, and im worried I might actually lose my real C drive.
Can someone explain what is going on with my comp, and a safe way to boot between the two OS'?
Its built into windows 8.
This is what I did.
Used disk management within windows 7 to shrink the partition its currently on. Shrunk it 50g.
Now you will have an unformatted partition. Use mini partition tool to format to ntfs. Also assign the partition a drive letter. I used W.
Now use magic disc to mount the windows 8 ISO to the virtual drive.
Don't run setup. Open the drive so you can see the contents of the ISO.
Now in the sources folder run the setup.exe, Not the one on the root of the ISO.
Setup will start. Install windows 8 to the partition you just made.
Let windows 8 complete setup and get all the way to the desktop or metro UI.
Restart your computer.
During the loading you will come across a screen that allows you to choose the OS. Now by default it times out at 5 seconds. At the bottom of the screen you'll see choose default OS and other settings. Click that within 5 seconds.
Change that to whatever you want. I changed mine to 30 seconds to give me enough time.
I had a similar issue when cloning my drive to an external to take with me using pwboot. Windows 8 would load fine but windows 7 wouldn't. But worked just fine on my internal drive. Mostly just use my external to use my old gateway with a broken internal hdd. Seriously hard to find an old school 2.5" IDE hdd. But windows 8 couldn't install my video card driver for s-video out so I stuck with just windows 7 on my external and never figured out the problem. Dual booting on my aspire one works like a champ though.
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So I'm considering throwing in my first SSD. I'm looking at nothing too fancy (OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA3 6GB/s, Read: 560MB/s, Write: 430MB/s).
I already have Windows 8 Pro installed and activated on a 500 Sata HD. I'd ideally like to throw in the SSD and have Windows running off of that. Now I've already seen a lot of posts recommended a clean install. Which I'd like to avoid if possible. I'm wondering if I could say, create a back up image of my C: from my SATA drive, wipe everything, install the SSD and do a fresh Win 8 install. Then once I'm up and running restore that image.
Or use some other Windows 8 recovery feature to back up files, settings and apps.
Anyone know if this is possible within Windows 8? I'm ultimately trying to avoid as much reinstalling of apps and programs as possible.
It doesn't hurt to find out. Do your image backup, pull out the HDD, plug in the SSD, and restore. If it works, great. If not, plug the HDD back in and figure out an alternative.
I don't see why that wouldn't work, other than Win8 installing any needed driver for the SSD, and perhaps a re-auth, since a HDD change qualifies as a "major" config change.
I'm assuming you already have a good image backup program handy.
So I guess I'd lose my activation key?
Try reading some articles about it? I have no experience with it so i have no idea:
http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid+state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows
why don't you just ghost the drive this is what I do. I forget the name of the software I use but it is free and really easy and you can ghost the drive you on as it runs before windows boots. I will update once I have found the software as its been a while since I needed to do this.
edit: I don't have it on my laptop and I wont be back to work till Monday but if you google clone hard drive there are many options. You want one that will clone the running partition.
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/home-edition/
pistol44 said:
So I guess I'd lose my activation key?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Although I have never tried it, you can backup your windows activation activation following this:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/35737-GUIDE-How-to-backup-and-restore-Windows-8-activation
or just clone the harddrive like I said then its all just as if it was on the old you just plug new one in and off you go, then format the old one once tested. 2 points on this your going back into same hardware so that does not matter and windows 8 you can take the hdd out of a pc plug it into diff hardware and off you go after a slightly longer boot. I have swapped from an amd fx based desktop and put into an intel Centrino laptop and worked. I did this after cloning the drive so both desktop and laptop have activated windows 8 from same cloned hard drive (bit odd though as seems to avoid the need for keys and could be a work around to distro win 8)
pistol44 said:
So I'm considering throwing in my first SSD. I'm looking at nothing too fancy (OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA3 6GB/s, Read: 560MB/s, Write: 430MB/s).
I already have Windows 8 Pro installed and activated on a 500 Sata HD. I'd ideally like to throw in the SSD and have Windows running off of that. Now I've already seen a lot of posts recommended a clean install. Which I'd like to avoid if possible. I'm wondering if I could say, create a back up image of my C: from my SATA drive, wipe everything, install the SSD and do a fresh Win 8 install. Then once I'm up and running restore that image.
Or use some other Windows 8 recovery feature to back up files, settings and apps.
Anyone know if this is possible within Windows 8? I'm ultimately trying to avoid as much reinstalling of apps and programs as possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are you more worried about your desktop apps or your RT apps? If you have signed in with a Microsoft account and you are on your Trusted PC, your RT app settings will transfer to the new installs and you already know most RT apps install super fast.
If you are worried about your desktop apps, they will install much faster on an SSD drive and just make a backup copy of your "AppData" folder. That's what I did when refreshing my PC caused a bunch of errors and I re-installed.
Windows 8 uses different algorithms for SSDs than for HDDs so ghosting your drive is a bad idea.
dragon_76 said:
Are you more worried about your desktop apps or your RT apps? If you have signed in with a Microsoft account and you are on your Trusted PC, your RT app settings will transfer to the new installs and you already know most RT apps install super fast.
If you are worried about your desktop apps, they will install much faster on an SSD drive and just make a backup copy of your "AppData" folder. That's what I did when refreshing my PC caused a bunch of errors and I re-installed.
Windows 8 uses different algorithms for SSDs than for HDDs so ghosting your drive is a bad idea.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
True, the RT apps will come back after the install.. I guess I was more concerned for the 15 to 20 games I had installed. I'm looking at a good 4-6 hours of re-install time to get it back to the same state I'm at now. All personal items are backed up externally so I'm ok there.
I guess I've considered just re-installing from scratch now. But last question is will I need to re-activate Windows 8 if I'm adding an SSD? Since I'll be formatting my current HDD, installing an SSD which I'll want the OS running off of I guess there's no way to do a fresh install and keep activation since I'll be formatting the drive the OS is on.
Can I hypothetically, install the SSD initiate a Windows "reset" and hope that it gives me the choice to format my old HDD and install to the new SSD. For some reason I think not. Or do I need to image my C: drive, install the SSD then copy the image over then do a reset? I'm so confused..
pistol44 said:
True, the RT apps will come back after the install.. I guess I was more concerned for the 15 to 20 games I had installed. I'm looking at a good 4-6 hours of re-install time to get it back to the same state I'm at now. All personal items are backed up externally so I'm ok there.
I guess I've considered just re-installing from scratch now. But last question is will I need to re-activate Windows 8 if I'm adding an SSD? Since I'll be formatting my current HDD, installing an SSD which I'll want the OS running off of I guess there's no way to do a fresh install and keep activation since I'll be formatting the drive the OS is on.
Can I hypothetically, install the SSD initiate a Windows "reset" and hope that it gives me the choice to format my old HDD and install to the new SSD. For some reason I think not. Or do I need to image my C: drive, install the SSD then copy the image over then do a reset? I'm so confused..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can type in your serial and it will fail to activate by internet. Select to activate by phone and it should work, deactivating your old, erased installation.
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Ok guys let me give you a little background first.
I have a Lenovo Laptop and i wanted to upgrade to Windows 8. Lenovo puts alot of their own programs and stuff on the computer that were actually quite useful at times but they posted a pdf on their website that told me to uninstall 10 billion programs and drivers so I decided to install Windows 8 on a new partition I made which I then installed Windows 8 too without a hitch. I also did this because I didnt know how I would feel about the new OS but I really like it so i'm going to stay with it.
BTW I'm not savvy with this partition stuff at all. I was walked through it. I'm not a total noob though. i just get nervous.
My question to you guys is how can I remove the Windows 7 OS completely and merge that storage with my Windows 8 OS.
I have read its not as simple as just deleting the Windows 7 partition. I have read that if you delete something called a bootmgr (im pretty sure that means bootmanager)it will screw everything up and that it is sometimes in different locations.
I'm attaching a photo of what my drives look like currently. I'm guessing the bootmgr is on the partition with the red arrow pointing to it? If I am correct how do I add the Windows 7 partition (yellow arrow) to the Windows 8 partition (blue arrow)
The photo was taken from within the Windows 8 OS. i hope I have been clear enough for you guys.
You can delete your Windows 7 partition because Windows 8 now controls the bootmanager. Also, If you do delete the partition and boot manager is erased, I can walk you through restoring it. Plus the disk you burned to install Windows 8 with contains recovery tools that can restore the it. Just boot from the disk like you did when you installed Windows 8 and instead of selecting install now choose "Repair my computer" or "Fix problems that prevent Windows from starting". Microsoft has done a good job of making stuff like this recoverable from. Also, make sure you make a System Restore point. If you have an external drive you can also make a "recovery disk" in Windows 8 that will make an exact copy of the partitions of your choice. It takes a lot of space and will completely wipe the drive, so be sure to save any important files on the external drive before doing this.
housry23 said:
You can delete your Windows 7 partition because Windows 8 now controls the bootmanager. Also, If you do delete the partition and boot manager is erased, I can walk you through restoring it. Plus the disk you burned to install Windows 8 with contains recovery tools that can restore the it. Just boot from the disk like you did when you installed Windows 8 and instead of selecting install now choose "Repair my computer" or "Fix problems that prevent Windows from starting". Microsoft has done a good job of making stuff like this recoverable from. Also, make sure you make a System Restore point. If you have an external drive you can also make a "recovery disk" in Windows 8 that will make an exact copy of the partitions of your choice. It takes a lot of space and will completely wipe the drive, so be sure to save any important files on the external drive before doing this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This article told me the partition that is marked as active has the bootmgr on it. Is that correct?
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pwnerman said:
This article told me the partition that is marked as active has the bootmgr on it. Is that correct?
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think it is inside Windows 8. If you have Windows 7 installed and then install Windows 8, all the boot operations are handled by Windows 8 unless you have a third party boot manager installed or a Linux partition that would use grub. You are safe to delete the Windows 7 partition. It won't screw anything up. You are over thinking and over reading. If this partition WAS the one handling the boot operations, then as soon as you installed Windows 8, that changed. Just delete the Windows 7 partition and extend the Windows 8. You will probably have to do it during a boot up and it will probably take a third party program like Paragon Partition manager free or gparted live cd, but it's not going to screw up your bootmgr. Only way that would happen is if you deleted a Linux partition.
pwnerman said:
This article told me the partition that is marked as active has the bootmgr on it. Is that correct?
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes, the active partition must be the boot partition
housry23 said:
I think it is inside Windows 8. If you have Windows 7 installed and then install Windows 8, all the boot operations are handled by Windows 8 unless you have a third party boot manager installed or a Linux partition that would use grub. You are safe to delete the Windows 7 partition. It won't screw anything up. You are over thinking and over reading. If this partition WAS the one handling the boot operations, then as soon as you installed Windows 8, that changed. Just delete the Windows 7 partition and extend the Windows 8. You will probably have to do it during a boot up and it will probably take a third party program like Paragon Partition manager free or gparted live cd, but it's not going to screw up your bootmgr. Only way that would happen is if you deleted a Linux partition.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Err, no, that isn't always true, my Boot files are on a separate partition to my Win 8, if I delete my Win 7 I will lose the ability to boot, of course its fixable with the Win 8 DVD. Win 8 does take over the boot manager as is fairly obvious, but it doesn't change the location, its for this very reason that when installing multiple copies and versions of windows you always start with the oldest, each successive install will update the boot manager but it will leave it in place, unless of course you install Linux which can and will screw it right up an around the corner if your not very careful!
It's been stuck on this screen after I deleted and extended the drive with ease us partition manager. It rebooted I saw the lenovo bios screen then the Windows logo. Then this screen showed up and hasn't moved for about 2 hours. I'm guessing I got screwed.
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I just got an Asus Zenbook UX31A.
It has a 128 GB of SSD. but when I went to Desktop > File Explorer > Desktop > Computer.
Where it says Hard Disk Drives (1), it says that I have 65.5 GB free of 93.9 GB. WHAT THE HELL?!
I bought this laptop cause it has a 128 GB SSD, and I know that I won't get all 128 GB of space, but the fact that HALF is already taking space?!
How can I find out what it is, and how do I remove it?!
Thank you.
There is a windows 8 recovery partition using about 10gb (this can be moved to USB).
ASUS may also have a recovery partition.
Normally on a 128gb drive you would only expect about 110 to be usable.
Of what is used on the C drive. Windows 8 alone takes up a good 10-15gb. Apps add more onto that. Anything asus preinstall adds onto that again.
Ok, so how can I remove these recovery partitions? or should I not remove them at all?
I'm thinking of installing this: http://download.cnet.com/Advanced-U...9986.html?tag=dropDownForm;productListing;pop
to uninstall some stuff. Probably all asus apps.
xMoKax said:
Ok, so how can I remove these recovery partitions? or should I not remove them at all?
I'm thinking of installing this: http://download.cnet.com/Advanced-U...9986.html?tag=dropDownForm;productListing;pop
to uninstall some stuff. Probably all asus apps.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i would open up disk manager (type disk under settings in start and click on create and format disk partitions), and see what is there. if you post a screen shot of the program open, ill look at it and tell you
Is this what you wanted to see?
Here is another screenshot, after I opened OS (C:
So, five partitions. The first one is the boot partition (it's usually only 200MB and can happily fit in less, but that doesn't matter much). Don't mess with it. Technically it's only required that you use a separate boot partition when using BitLocker, but it's a pretty good setup.
The second is nearly a gig of some kind of recovery data. It's too small to be the Win8 recovery installer, so I'm guessing it's some pile of Asus-specific crap that probably isn't even useful enough to be something like a bunch of drivers that you could download newer versions of from their website; more likely its useless garbage like that wallpaper it comes with and other pointless stuff. Check before deleting it, I guess, but it should be safe to kill.
The third is your OS volume. It is, as you noted, less than 80% of the SSD's size.
The fourth is probably the standard Win8 recovery image. It's basically a Win8 install DVD, and its purpose is to allow the use of the "Reset" functionality to wipe the OS clean - essentially just automating the "format and reinstall" process. It also can be used to repair a system that becomes damaged or to manually reinstall Windows if you manage to nuke the OS partition so hard you can't use the Reset feature. This partition can usually be safely removed after writing it to a DVD or Flashdrive; there are steps and utilities for doing so.
The fifth is the real hog that's using up your space, being almost four times as large as all the other non-OS volumes put together and taking up about 18% of the total capacity of the drive. My guess is that this is the image used to restore the OS to exactly the state it was in when you bought it (Asus pre-installed-crapware and all). It's almost certainly a complete waste of space, unless you paid for a copy of Office or something when you bought the computer and the re-installer is on there. Anyhow, that partition as a whole is too big to copy off to anything except a large flashdrive/SD card/etc., an external HD, or a blu-ray disk, but it *might* be possible to mount it and find any parts that are actually of any real value and blow the rest.
If you're interested, here's what I would do (it's what I do, and recommend doing, with *any* new PC): now that you've verified that the OS boots up, the hardware works, etc, prepare a bootable flashdrive, put the Windows installer on it (should be possible to get it from the 4GB recovery volume; as I said, there are steps and utilities to do this), download all the drivers for the hardware from the OEM's site (Asus.com in this case) and put them on the flashdrive too, then reboot from the flashdrive. Choose to do a custom install of Windows, delete every single partition from the existing scheme, select the resulting unpartitioned space, and tell Windows to install there (it will set up a sane partition scheme for you). This process removes unwanted partitions, removes OEM garbage (which can be a pain to remove otherwise), gives you a clean Windows install without the horriffic tampering the OEMs like to do (interesting fact: I ran Vista, and found it just fine and far better than XP, with no crashes since RTM on my clean-installed copy... until I tried using an OEM copy on somebody else's machine - more powerful than mine, mind you - and discovered what all the complaints about slowness and crashing came from; the difference between an OEM and a clean retail copy of the OS were astonishing and painful), and puts you in control of the disk usage.
Follow this
GoodDayToDie said:
So, five partitions. The first one is the boot partition (it's usually only 200MB and can happily fit in less, but that doesn't matter much). Don't mess with it. Technically it's only required that you use a separate boot partition when using BitLocker, but it's a pretty good setup.
The second is nearly a gig of some kind of recovery data. It's too small to be the Win8 recovery installer, so I'm guessing it's some pile of Asus-specific crap that probably isn't even useful enough to be something like a bunch of drivers that you could download newer versions of from their website; more likely its useless garbage like that wallpaper it comes with and other pointless stuff. Check before deleting it, I guess, but it should be safe to kill.
The third is your OS volume. It is, as you noted, less than 80% of the SSD's size.
The fourth is probably the standard Win8 recovery image. It's basically a Win8 install DVD, and its purpose is to allow the use of the "Reset" functionality to wipe the OS clean - essentially just automating the "format and reinstall" process. It also can be used to repair a system that becomes damaged or to manually reinstall Windows if you manage to nuke the OS partition so hard you can't use the Reset feature. This partition can usually be safely removed after writing it to a DVD or Flashdrive; there are steps and utilities for doing so.
The fifth is the real hog that's using up your space, being almost four times as large as all the other non-OS volumes put together and taking up about 18% of the total capacity of the drive. My guess is that this is the image used to restore the OS to exactly the state it was in when you bought it (Asus pre-installed-crapware and all). It's almost certainly a complete waste of space, unless you paid for a copy of Office or something when you bought the computer and the re-installer is on there. Anyhow, that partition as a whole is too big to copy off to anything except a large flashdrive/SD card/etc., an external HD, or a blu-ray disk, but it *might* be possible to mount it and find any parts that are actually of any real value and blow the rest.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your response! So..
Partition 1: Don't Touch.
Partition 2: Asus bull****. Check first. OK to delete.
Partition 3: Volume. Don't Touch.
Partition 4: Win8 Recovery. OK to delete, after backup. Do I have to back it up to thumb drive? Can I back it up to an External Hard drive? DynamicRam told me to follow this: http://lifehacker.com/5991431/how-t...r-windows-8-and-free-up-some-hard-drive-space <Will that work?
Partition 5: I didn't buy a copy of Office, so I'm guessing that it is a complete waste of space. I'll try to mount it and see if there is anything that I would actually need [probably show you a screenshot], and delete the rest. If for some reason I'm not able to mount it, will I still be able to delete the contents inside?
GoodDayToDie said:
If you're interested, here's what I would do (it's what I do, and recommend doing, with *any* new PC): now that you've verified that the OS boots up, the hardware works, etc, prepare a bootable flashdrive, put the Windows installer on it (should be possible to get it from the 4GB recovery volume; as I said, there are steps and utilities to do this), download all the drivers for the hardware from the OEM's site (Asus.com in this case) and put them on the flashdrive too, then reboot from the flashdrive. Choose to do a custom install of Windows, delete every single partition from the existing scheme, select the resulting unpartitioned space, and tell Windows to install there (it will set up a sane partition scheme for you). This process removes unwanted partitions, removes OEM garbage (which can be a pain to remove otherwise), gives you a clean Windows install without the horriffic tampering the OEMs like to do (interesting fact: I ran Vista, and found it just fine and far better than XP, with no crashes since RTM on my clean-installed copy... until I tried using an OEM copy on somebody else's machine - more powerful than mine, mind you - and discovered what all the complaints about slowness and crashing came from; the difference between an OEM and a clean retail copy of the OS were astonishing and painful), and puts you in control of the disk usage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This right here, you said to put the Windows installer in a flashdrive, and to get it from a 4gb recovery volume? So, you're saying that inside Partition 4, the Win8 Recovery, there will be the Windows installer inside, and the file will be 4gb in size?
I'm really wanting to use Ubuntu instead of Windows 8. Will my best bet be, to backup the Windows installer in a flashdrive, completely delete everything (except partition 1 and 3?), and install Ubuntu?
Also, according to this person:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HU_jEWT6w8
It's best for me to install Ubuntu 13.04, instead of 12.04, since 13.04 has Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot BIOS support, whatever that means.
To sum up what I pretty much want to do, is to remove all bloatware and pretty much delete Windows 8 (but back it up, for warranty purposes, if something happens to my laptop), and have only Ubuntu on my laptop.
Is this possible?
Been doing research all night, came across this:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Installing-Ubuntu-13-04-348582.shtml
In the "Installation Type" section, it says you have a couple of options, and option 2 says:
"2. Erase OS and reinstall/Erase disk and install Ubuntu (if there's no OS on it)
- Choose this option ONLY if you have another OS and you want to install Ubuntu 13.04 on a fresh drive, replacing the existing OS. This option will completely wipe the target disk drive."
So, can I just select Partition 5, and will it completely wipe everything inside, and install only Ubuntu 13.04? Just wanting to know if this is possible or not. Instead of having to go through the 5th partition and deleting/backing up whatever I need, and then installing Ubuntu.