Hi all, not sure if anyone else has tried to upgrade to Windows 8 using Boot Camp, and then set up a Parallels virtual machine from it. Boot Camp does not support this officially and there are a few Parallels gotchas to get past. Don't blame me if things do not go as planned. You can get Windows 8 at discount price using the Windows 7 upgrade program in Windows. That is what drove me to upgrade rather than leaving well enough. I knew Parallels 8 supported Windows but I wanted a working Boot Camp partition so I did the upgrade while running from Boot Camp. Boot Camp does not officially support anything beyond Windows 7. Reportedly clean Windows 8 installations work under Boot Camp, upgrades do not. But you can't upgrade for $35 or $50 from a clean install and I was not about to pay over $300 for a clean install. Here are the steps I used. #1 use Windows upgrade and figure out what it will cost you to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro. Pay for it and then download the required files. This downloads a small file that you run to download the required files. At the end you can burn to a CD (which I did not do) or upgrade from the upgrade program directly. Probably the safest is to burn to a disk, but I upgraded directly from the program. First gotcha is that the upgrade installer recommends deactivating your antivirus. With Norton active it would upgrade for an hour only to get an error and to roll back to Windows 7. It absolutely would not upgrade with Norton Antivirus running. Second potential gotcha is that users have reported after upgrading then end up with multiple Parallels Tools installations which makes their system unstable. Since I was upgrading within Boot Camp and Parallels Tools therefore was not active I did not remove it as some suggest. Do or do not remove as you see fit. Third significant gotcha is that if I selected "Upgrade and keep all user files and settings" or whoever it is worded is that it would instal Windows 8 and after several reboots would roll back to Windows 7. I finally selected the option to only keep user files which did the trick and allowed Windows 8 Pro to install and actually boot. I don't know which Windows 7 setting was causing problems (perhaps Parallels Tools?) but the install worked. Upgrading requires several reboots of Windows along the way. Some upgraders state that at this point they did not have a working keyboard or mouse and had to use a USB connected mouse (you can pull up a virtual keyboard with your mouse so having no keyboard for a short time is not a show stopper). On my 2010 MacBook Pro the trackpad worked (very low tracking speed) and my keyboard worked. Windows 8 reported some devices as not working like my iSight camera, microphone, etc. No show stoppers. Users online have researched working Windows drivers you can download to enable "unsupported" hardware but I elected to use the Apple Boot Camp drivers. I did not think I would get this far so I had not downloaded the latest Boot Camp drivers. Ah but the Boot Camp drivers "do not support Windows 8", or so it says on Apple's support page. Ignoring prudence I charged on and used Boot Camp (the Mountain Lion version) to download the drivers. When you run "Boot Camp Assistant" it will give you the choice to "Install or remove Windows 7" and you MUST uncheck that box. You don't want to remove Windows or you can't upgrade and need to start all over. The top box "Download the latest Windows support software from Apple", but again don't select the bottom box! With the Mountain Lion version of Boot Camp Assistant you get an option to install the drivers to a CD or a USB memory stick. If you elect the latter you need to have the USB formatted for Windows (use Drive Utility, click the erase tab, select Format: MS-DOS (FAT), name it if you want and select the "erase button"). I installed my drivers to a USB stick. Next boot back into Windows 8. Insert the USB or CD you just made. In the USB I opened the drive, opened a folder called "WindowsSupport" and double clicked a program called "setup." After this and a Windows 8 reboot all the drivers for my MacBook were working properly! Windows 8 was already registered. Enable or install an antivirus, remember PC's have a lot of viruses out there! I then installed Office 2013 and some other software without a hitch. Booting back to the Mac side of course my Parallels Windows 7 virtual machine no longer worked. I removed the virtual machine using Parallels 8. You now have the option to create a virtual machine using Boot Camp. A potential gotcha here is that if you use Tuxera NTFS (or likely any other Mac NTFS drivers) Parallels 8 won't show you your Boot Camp partition. If you don't use either then skip to the next paragraph. You need to deactivate your third party Mac NTFS drivers in order for Parallels to show you your Boot Camp partition. If you use Tuxera NTFS go to Preference, select Tusera NTFS, click the lock at the bottom left, enter your password. On the main tab (General) click "disable." If you instead go to the next tab "Volumes" and disable your drive this is permanent and requires removing and reinstalling Tuxera NTFS, or editing a configuration file to fix. Ensure you disable the NTFS drivers from the general tab, don't disable them for the drive or you will make things more complicated. After selecting to use your Boot Camp partition in Parallels you will get an caution stating the Windows 8 is not compatible with Boot Camp. You can safely ignore this warning because you are will past this point already. Click the box on the warning so it won't show every time you try to run Windows 8 in Parallels. Parallels 8 will do it's magic. In the end it should install Parallels Tools (if not you can use Parallels's menu to open the Parallels Tools virtual CD to then run the installer). At this point Windows 8, Office, etc. will not be registered. You either need to use the phone support to register Windows, Office, etc. on "a new machine" of you need to have another registration key handy. You will (may) get the programs registered a second time without the need to pay again, but Microsoft is far more restrictive after that. Ensure Boot Camp and Parallels 8 work properly (you get 30 days to try it out) before you register. Any significant changes to the setup will result in the need to again register the programs, and believe me you don't want to do that. If you disabled Tuxera NTFS earlier you can reenable it. Parallels has no problem with Tuxera other than creating a virtual machine from a drive/partition with it active. Enjoy
