Upgrading the BUILD PC to Windows 8 Release Preview

At the BUILD conference last year Microsoft provided attendees with a Developer Preview of Windows 8 running upon a touch-based Samsung PC. In this blog post we’ll walk through the upgrade of this PC to the Windows 8 Release Preview.

You’ll want to begin by downloading the Windows 8 Release Preview ISO image and then creating a bootable USB flash drive using the Microsoft Store USB/DVD download tool tool. After creating the bootable USB flash drive you may also want to copy the ISO images for the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate to the root of the flash drive also.

If you need to access the BIOS upon the Samsung Developer Preview PC you can do this by holding down both the volume up and down buttons simultaneously.

Within this blog post however we’ll use the Windows 8 Command Prompt, accessed from the boot options, to install from the bootable USB flash drive as several users have had difficulty getting the BUILD PC to boot from USB.

We’ll begin by ensuring we can install from the bootable USB flash drive as some users have had difficulty configuring the Samsung PC to boot from USB devices. Within the Windows 8 Start screen (shown above) type “cmd” to search for the Command Prompt.

 

You’ll then want to swipe to select (see below) the Command Prompt to “Run as administrator”. Alternatively, if you have a mouse installed upon the machine you can also right click on the Command Prompt to see the same options.

Within the Command Prompt execute the following command:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Windows 8 Release Preview”

You should then see confirmation that the boot entry was successfully copied as shown below.

When you reboot the PC you’ll now be prompted to choose between two different operating systems although both actually point to the same copy of Windows.

Instead select “Change defaults or choose other options”.

Next select “Choose other options”

next select “Troubleshoot”

next select “Advanced options”

next choose “Command Prompt”

With Windows 8 we now have a secure Command Prompt that requires you to login to access the PC, next choose an account to continue.

After entering the password for the chosen account you’ll be presented with the Windows Command Prompt.

You’ll now be able to run the setup.exe from the bootable flash drive which will then initiate the installation of the Windows 8 Release Preview.

You’ll now be able to install the Windows 8 Release Preview.

With the Windows 8 Release Preview installed you’ll then be able to simply double click the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate ISO images you copied to the bootable USB flash drive to mount them as virtual DVD drives and then install the developer tools from the virtual drives.

Enjoy!