Win8 Final Beta Out

[nihil]

Actually, I don't think that it is a Microsoft issue; it looks more like Intel and the MoBo/BIOS manufacturers doing to me.

It came about because I lent a SATA II HDD to a friend, who was desperate for a stop-gap until his replacement drive arrived.

I had just used it to test the hardware build of a Core i7 2600K. It has a Gigabyte MoBo and I used Windows8 64bit Release Preview as the OS. No problems, nor when I replaced the drive with SATA III SSD and HDD drives.

Come to think of it, I do seem to recall some sort of message about formatting when I installed the SATA II drive, as it had come from an AMD machine and had either the developer or consumer preview on it.

When he tried to load Windows7 it wouldn't load the installer programs and he just got a blinking cursor on the top left of a black screen. It was the same story when I tried Windows8 (32 & 64) Consumer and Release Previews and a 64bit Windows7 Ultimate.

I then tried Windows Vista 32bit Home Premium and it loaded the installer but said it couldn't load onto that HDD/partition. I messed about with deleting and recreating the partitions and with formatting but I got the same message.

I know that GTP has been around since the early '90s, and I believe that it was pretty much an Intel initiative back then?

The new Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Intel processors ship with Intel HD integrated graphics, and the MoBos have Intel Chipsets to support this. My guess that there is something in the BIOS that lets the installation happen normally?

When you try it on older technology, the GTP HDD partitioning isn't recognised.

IIRC Microsoft introduced a disk wipe for clean installations with Vista?

I guess they need to sharpen their act up, and at least warn you like Vista does; although the ideal would be to let you wipe the old partitions and formatting, and install clean.

I suspect it has something to do with the hidden partitions that Windows 7 & 8 create, but I don't see why you don't even get a message, given that the installation disks are bootable media, and Vista manages to do it? I did notice, however, that although I could delete the partitions I couldn't get rid of the actual partitioning, so that 300MB partition remained, even though it was available space.

Fortunately, I don't suppose many people would remove an HDD from a Core-i to put into an older AMD machine.

The ultimate solution is just to nuke the damn thing and start over