[MinnowBoard] Installing Windows 8.1 on the MinnowBoard Max?

[Peter Wieland]

Sorry to hear about the problems with the script.  Lasse pointed out the problem with running it on Windows 7 to me earlier this week - it's going to take some serious surgery to remove the dependency on the Disk module.

In the meantime you should be able to do a normal install from a Windows 8/8.1 USB key onto a SATA drive.

It should theoretically also work to an SD card if you go into the firmware settings and make the SD card non removable (it's under the LPSS settings).  I has having some trouble the last time I tried that, but I think my SD card might have been too small.

The installation guide contains a link to the Windows Industry 8.1 trial image that we've tested on the board.  You get an ISO - mount it and copy the contents onto a USB key.

Windows 7 would probably install on the system with the 64-bit firmware.  To my recollection though Windows 7 didn't support UEFI on x86 systems.

I haven't seen the script make a USB drive unmountable afterwards.  Do you see the disk show up in the disk manager when you plug it back in?  That said I should be able to put the registry flag back after I'm done - I'll file a bug to take care of that.

-p

From: elinux-minnowboard-bounces at lists.elinux.org [mailto:elinux-minnowboard-bounces at lists.elinux.org] On Behalf Of Timothy Hurita
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2014 11:23 AM
To: elinux-minnowboard at lists.elinux.org
Subject: Re: [MinnowBoard] Installing Windows 8.1 on the MinnowBoard Max?


The Create-DevboardKey.ps1 script didn't for me either and to make matters worse it creates a reg entry that prevents the USB thumb drive from mapping the next time it's plugged into the system. Deleting that key fixes the issue.

Also, the Win7 USB download tool doesn't create a UEFI bootable thumbdrive that's usable on the MAX.

What does work is a free tool called Rufus - http://rufus.akeo.ie/

Set the partition scheme to GPT partition for UEFI computers, file system FAT32, 4K cluster size. I am going from memory here but that seems to be the magic formula if I remember correctly.

I've had Win 8.1U1 x64 Embedded running just fine for a couple weeks now. There's quite a few devices yellow banged in device manager but I did find the HD graphics which helped quite a bit.

Tim
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