In my haste to upgrade to Windows 8 I forgot to test my USB installation drive and it wasn’t until it was too late that I had already wiped my SSD (and Windows 7) leaving the Windows 8 ISO stranded on the hard drive. It seems that my motherboard just doesn’t want to boot off a USB drive and the best I could achieve is a hung computer.
Oops.
The solution here was to go back to the tried and tested medium of choice, the humble DVD. I have used a bootable copy of Linux off a DVD to retrieve the ISO off the hard drive so I can copy it to another USB drive and then use my MacBook Pro to burn it to another DVD. Admittedly, I would not expect the average user out there to be able to get themselves out of this situation so I would simply offer this advice.
Test that you can boot off your installation media and that it will get into setup before you decide to wipe any of your drives. You can always wipe them later on once you know things are going to work properly without the inconvenience of having no operating system whatsoever to get you through sticky situations.
Oh well, no harm in a bit of dabbling around a bit before I get going with Windows 8 🙂
Update: In the end, I had to change the SATA port to which my Blu-ray drive was connected and set it to IDE mode. Having too many AHCI ROMs loading before the installation seems to interfere with getting the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 solid state driver out of the starting blocks.
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