I have been attemption to install Windows 8 on a Dell XPS machine running Windows Premium.
It has been a completely pointless exercise.
The Windows 8 upgrade tool has checked my PC and confirmed that apart from McAfee all is well. This is a false truth.
Firstly, there is an issue if you have the nVidia update assistant. The machine will not restart during the upgrade of Windows 8 due to a user account which is created by nVidia when you install their auto-update. So, you need to uninstall that software to make sure you can proceed.
So you uninstall it and all should be well with the world . . . nope. You have to “remove” the account from your machine. This is a quite technical activity – again, not well documented but possible.
Then you restart the upgrade and all should be good. No, its not. This is because McAfee uninstall doesnt actually uninstall it. You need to uninstall it using a special – again poorly documented – uninstall which you need to download from McAfee.
Once this is done, all should be well to complete the installation.
Again, no – this time my Dell machine is to blame. It appears that the Dell active partition is different to the partition on which Windows 7 is installed. This is due to the Dell DataSafe (can’t remember the name) software. Their software on the HDD is, in an invisible partition which cant be removed / deleted / updated.
When the Windows 8 upgrade tool tries to restart, it tries to ensure the MBR (master boot record) is ready for the new software. This is not on the OS partition and infact on the Dell recovery partition – and therefore, again, it doesnt work.
The whole thing is not well documented and doesn’t work at all – the only way i can guess to get this to work is to blow away the HDD and do a Windows 8 install from a DVD disk and do a clean install.