Last night I had a crazy idea – to try out W8 and its famous Metro. I found a download link and within 3 hours I had all 2.6GB at home. I looked over the W8 HW requirements, and the only HDD I had offered less than 16GB. The only free partition had 12.3GB. In front of it sat a partition stuffed to bursting, F: (Documents), sized exactly 10GB.
So I moved roughly 7.5GB over to D:, compressed the rest and tried to shrink that partition down to 4097 MB. After an hour of the HDD working hard, it finally worked. Just to be safe, I copied the entire contents of F: to C:, so that if something went haywire, I wouldn’t lose vital data. The copying took about half an hour too.
Then I tried to delete the last primary partition (sort of G:), but somehow it took the logical partition E: (Downloads) down with it. Strangely, it left alone partition F:, which now had 4GB. So I installed some recovery software and restored those files to C: from the former E:. Finally I extracted the downloaded ISO to C: and wanted to install. I confirmed that I didn’t want to download updates, entered the serial key, accepted the license, but then it just curtly announced that C: needs 16GB of free space.
I searched Google for a way around it – supposedly it’s enough to boot from DVD in the BIOS and pick the partition there. But there wasn’t a single blank DVD at home. I didn’t feel like putting it on an SD card, plus I don’t know whether the W7 tool would work for W8 as well, and my SD card reader probably doesn’t work. Or maybe it could go on a virtual drive, but I didn’t want to clutter my system with drivers for it either. And that’s how it ended. I truly can’t understand how an OS that isn’t RTM can be pushed through the usual installation path instead of the existing final build of the OS.
No sensible person can be serious about this! With this move, or rather something close to a crime, MS has completely blown it with me, W8 and all. I don’t think it will get much better by RTM, if at all, and I’ll try to avoid W8. I thought brilliant ideas like this were mainly a Google thing, but now I see that Microsoft could also use a good cold shower to bring them to their senses. And one more gem – I had already tried installing the W8 Developer Preview and it ended exactly the same way. (…) But now I’ve hopefully learned my lesson.
This can’t be happening. But it does have one upside. I’ll merge F: and G: into a single partition and it will have 22.3GB in total. Now I’m cured of trying out both W8 and Linux. And now I’m off to write that letter and build that program for creating Opera extensions. The only thing left to say is that even falling flat on your face is a step forward… 🙂