Install Windows 8 Developer Preview in VirtualBox

The pre-release of Windows 8 (Developer Preview) is available to download as of today. Testing it can be risky, so a virtual machine is a good place to try it out. You can download the Developer Preview from the new Windows Dev Center. MSDN subscribers can download some additional Windows 8 resources.

Before you start, make sure your PC supports hardware virtualization. This page explains how to enable it in the BIOS if your system supports it: https://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/support/configure-bios.aspx.

Also, make sure you have at least 20 GB of free space on your system.

In this post, I'll show you how to set up Windows 8 Developer Preview in VirtualBox. I'm assuming you're running the latest VirtualBox version available at the time of writing. You can download VirtualBox here.

To boot from the ISO, configure the following settings in VirtualBox.

1. Create a new virtual machine and give it a name, for example "Win 8 Developer Preview".
2. Choose Windows 7 or Windows 7 (64-bit) as the operating system, depending on the ISO you downloaded.
3. Allocate memory for your virtual machine (1024 MB).
4. Create a virtual hard disk and make sure you check Start-up Disk.
5. Allocate at least 20 GB using a dynamically allocated VDI.
6. Finish the wizard.

Your virtual machine is now created, but it needs a few additional settings to work.

1. Select the virtual machine you just created.
2. Click Settings.
3. Go to System.
4. Check IO APIC under Extended Features.
5. Go to the Processor tab and check Enable PAE/NX.
6. Go to Storage and select Storage Tree.
7. Load your ISO into the virtual CD/DVD drive.
8. Press OK.

That's all the configuration you need to start your virtual machine. Click Start and it will boot up. Follow the installation wizard, and you're good to go.

I installed it on my Ubuntu machine. I still need to fine-tune the virtual machine settings to make it more stable. Currently, I'm running it with two CPU cores and 1024 MB of memory.

Let me know if anything is missing from this post. Have fun, and share it if you find it useful.