[sandykoufax]

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

If someone have interested in this, try to beta test.
Hope no problem with Maxwell too.

[mtripoli]

I had an extra SSD drive kicking around, so I installed it on that. Played with it a bit, already decided I didn't like the big icon/program screen thing. Got past that, feels like Win 7. Maybe a little faster on this machine. Then it crashed... tried re-booting, said it was broken and tried fixing itself. After awhile I gave up and unplugged the drive. I dual boot via the BIOS into Win7x64 or XP. When I booted to XP it came up with a screen to boot in to Win 8 or "a previous version". So...

It wasn't enough that I put it on a !@#$% separate drive, clean install. Oh noooooo Microcrap, you HAD to go and mess with the whole machine. Go ahead and try to find how to get rid of this damn boot screen. No info, nadda, zip. Thanks for NOTHING MS!

[dmeyer]

downloading it now. Going to test it in a virtual machine,

[Ha_Loe]

I had an extra SSD drive kicking around, so I installed it on that. Played with it a bit, already decided I didn't like the big icon/program screen thing. Got past that, feels like Win 7. Maybe a little faster on this machine. Then it crashed... tried re-booting, said it was broken and tried fixing itself. After awhile I gave up and unplugged the drive. I dual boot via the BIOS into Win7x64 or XP. When I booted to XP it came up with a screen to boot in to Win 8 or "a previous version". So...

It wasn't enough that I put it on a !@#$% separate drive, clean install. Oh noooooo Microcrap, you HAD to go and mess with the whole machine. Go ahead and try to find how to get rid of this damn boot screen. No info, nadda, zip. Thanks for NOTHING MS!

"Clean" installs only happen with clean primary drives... you didn't make your SSD the primary boot drive before installing, did you?

Find the boot.ini on your primary drive (may have hidden/sys attribs) and remove the appropriate entry.

[mtripoli]

"Clean" installs only happen with clean primary drives... you didn't make your SSD the primary boot drive before installing, did you?

Find the boot.ini on your primary drive (may have hidden/sys attribs) and remove the appropriate entry.

No, I did not. I selected the drive from a list of installed drives. And I am horribly terribly ashamed for doing such a thing.

I should have known that MS would have spread their virus...oops, I mean "goodness" around all over other installed operating systems... interestingly enough it didn't touch the drive with Win 7 x64 on it, only the XP drive... I mean, nobody in their right mind would ever consider not having the latest, most updated OS on their machine. Ever. For any reason.

I feel so dirty, I must go bath...

[mtripoli]

Just came across this: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/desktop-os/ ... -40094017/

Nice MS, reeeeaaaallll nice...

[mtripoli]

BTW: boot.ini didn't have an entry for Win 8. However, there was a "new" file called "bootmgr" in the root drive. I researched it a bit and found that XP doesn't use bootmgr, Vista and later do. I renamed it to "xbootmgr", just in case (I knew I could change it back from the Win 7 side). Rebooted and the Win 8 friendly logon screen is gone.

[Ha_Loe]

Well, since you seem a bit anti MS and (don't get me wrong) a little bit naive with the boot process, I'll try and clear up some things.

Your PC starts form the BIOS/UEFI, which is a hardcoded on a memory chip on your motherboard.

The BIOS boot option selects one of the disks/partitions to be the primary one.

Then the BIOS tries to find a valid Boot Record on this drive and executes it. There can be one and only one Boot Record per drive. This is nothing MS specific.

If you already have an OS installed on the current primary partition, the new OS cna decide
1) to erease the old OS's boot record
2) to install a software boot manager that allows you to decide which OS to boot from this partition.

You can choose to install the new OS on any other drive, still the BIOS will try to boot the primary and will fail if it doesn't find a valid boot record there.

This is nothing MS specific. It would have happened with Linux in the exact same way. This is neccessary to let the new OS boot while keeping the old OS alive. The secondary boot manager is only necessary on the primary drive so every other drives boot record will remain untouched.

P.S.: boot.ini was the way XP and Win2k handeled boot options. Haven't used this from Vista on... there should be some user readable file containing the boot options. If you delete all but one option, the system schould boot through.

[mtripoli]

Well, gee Ha Loe, thanks for clearing all that up. You're right, I may be a little naive, after all I only starting using computers when I wire wrapped my first one in around 1978 based on a MITS Altair design. It had 1K of memory and programmed in binary with banks of switches. Programs were written on an old fashioned yellow pad in machine code and transferred by hand. Running a program meant flipping the switch between RUN/STOP. After that I've built every single computer I've had. Maybe it's that new-fangled BIOS that's got me all turned around...

And I admit, I'm the only one in the entire world that's a "bit anti MS"; everyone else thinks they're just swell.

I'm going to skip right over your explanation of booting; if I didn't know anything about this stuff I'd think you correct. I do know something about it so I'll skip over all the holes in the explanation.

Whether you agree or not, I stand by my assertion that doing anything, at all, whatsoever, to the installed OS's on the other drives, especially in light of the fact that this is a trial beta version is absolutely ludicrous. Then to interrupt the boot process to display a cute little screen asking if I really want to boot to a "previous OS" is just a smack in the face. In my case it was on another drive that I can format and forget it. I feel sorry for anyone that decides to "try it out" and finds they're now "stuck" with a trial beta that won't uninstall, messed with normal boot and their apps.

Your last statement is the most accurate; boot.ini was the way things were handled in XP, etc. With the advent of Vista things changed "just a little". But you knew that. If you in fact keep track of these things (per my previous post with link) you'll see that good 'ole MS is making every effort to tie the OS to the hardware (and will point the finger at the hardware vendor and say "It was them made me do it" when the brown stuff hits the spinning bladed object), in which case that little box sitting under your desk is under someone else's control, like it or not.

[Bubbaloo]

Nerd fight! Nerd fight!

Kidding kidding...

[mtripoli]

[Ha_Loe]

I'm sorry, I missed the irony in your first reply and since your post about boot.ini suggested you had to research...
Well, never mind.
Then again, as an installer, how would you tell it wasn't the boot loader you found on the first bootable drive that the BIOS would boot next time? After all the BIOS just booted from a DVD. How would you make sure the new OS would boot next time?

(And yeah, MS is the devil for making use of the HWs security features and surely is to only one to blame when OEMs decide to follow their suggestion to keep users from disabling the safe boot option. I mean no one in his right mind will ever buy a PS3 again because those corporate Sony guys locked out Linux. While Apple is good for all its effords into keeping its products clean, stable and predictable all those years by locking other HW manufacturers out.)

[numerobis]

[dmeyer]

Ha. I saw that video and it reminded me of a week ago when i tested out Win 8 in a virtual machine.

[mtripoli]

I couldn't find "Shutdown"...