Note: This is in my Hackintosh PC and is a seat of your pants story – it was reckless to a degree. That said I can confirm that Win 8 booted up – your system may be different. If you are using a new motherboard then you may get success booting straight away – Win 8 seems to fix any driver issues itself – I was connected to the internet and went from an Asus motherboard to a Gigabyte – also the processor went form a Intel Core Duo to a i7.
The rest of this article deals with how this worked in my system and what tweaks I had to do to get it working fully.
I take no responsibility for any problems you have – you will have to re-activate windows.
Backup everything – if you can – I had no option to do this.
You may have to enter Bios, I didn’t.
There maybe relevant information in what follows, mainly for those who have Hackintosh PC’s and want to add Windows.
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Last night I was sat there pondering.
Pondering, what if.
You see I have had to upgrade my motherboard.
It wasn’t a pretty scenario, I managed to pick one up that had more options than my previous motherboard and I was fortunate that with a little wrangling I got it for a very reasonable price.
I updated my PC and everything went smooth – this was in my mackintosh – I had a gigabyte motherboard previously and decided that it would be prudent to get the same make. It proved to be the wise decision – everything went smoothly.
I allowed myself plenty of time and duly took my time – as a consequence it took less time than I expected.
Huzzah!
Then last night I started a thinking’, a thinking’ and a stinkin’
My older Win 8 PC has been sat around doing nothing, a waiting for some attention.
Unfortunately it had no graphics card and I am without the funds or to be honest inclination to upgrade it at the moment.
There lay the problem though, it has games on and I really didn’t want to start again reinstalling either on that PC or this one.
Dual booting etc etc etc.
What if though, what if I could just, you know, like take the hard drives from the defunct pc and erm, you know, just um, plug them in.
Could that work?
I decided I wouldn’t google the answer.
I knew that answer.
It would have been, ‘Not blummin likely kimosabe’
Ah bugger it I thought.
Cracked open the PC.
Connected the hard drives.
Fired it up.
Boom!
Straight into Chameleon boot loader.
And straight into Mavericks.
Mmmm I thought.
Oh yes of course.
Should have done the F12 thing at bios. You know the boot options. School boy error that is.
But wait I thought, let’s not do that.
How responsible of you.
This time I rebooted and as it went from bios to chameleon I started to press ‘-‘ rapidly.
This brought me to the boot screen but with choices.
The Hard Drive I chose first was my, ‘Win 8’ hard drive.
No success.
Rebooted and this time chose, ‘Windows NTFS’
Success.
There was a delay – then up popped the Win 8 windows screen with a spinning circle.
Something was happening.
Then it said that Windows was setting up devices, Could this be happening.
And then it booted – into my Windows 8.
Lawks above – it worked!!!
I had to do some editing – mainly with Chameleon.
Below is what I edited in my org.chameleon.Boot.plist file.
First: I had to make it boot to a list of choices. Instant Menu – Yes.
<key>Instant Menu</key>
<string>Yes</string>
Second I wanted to hide all my other partitions.
<key>Hide Partition</key>
<string>hd(2,1) hd(2,2) hd(3,2) hd(3,3)</string>
The above are examples of the partitions I had to hide.
To get their, ‘Identities’ correct I pressed the tab key when the Instant Menu list came up.
There is another way using Terminal and the command ‘diskutil list’ but this was not correct for some reason.
Next I wanted to rename the Windows partition from, ‘Windows NTFS’ to ‘Win8’ – to do that I needed to identify which partition had the windows boot partition.
To rename I added the text below – you will have to adjust this txt to suit your setup.
<key>Rename Partition</key>
<string>hd(3,1) Win8</string>
All done.
Any questions? By al means comment and I’ll try to answer as best I can.
I am by no means an expert but I will help in any way I can.