Early adopters playing around with the Developer Preview of Windows 8 have undoubtedly come across a few issues when attempting to deploy the platform as a guest OS in a virtual machine running in a virtualization solution from Microsoft.
The first public taste of the next iteration of Windows is still in the Milestone 3 (M3) stage of the development process, and as such, various issues, including incompatibility problems, are to be expected.
Fact is that
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 M3 is incompatible with a few virtualization solutions, including two of Microsoft’s own products: Windows Virtual PC or on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.
Testers that attempted to deploy Windows 8 Developer Preview on Windows Virtual PC or on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 have come across this error "HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED."
“When you install Windows Developer Preview (codenamed "Windows 8") in a Windows Virtual PC or Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine environment, the installation fails. Additionally, you receive the following error message:
Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn’t handle, and now it needs to restart. You can search for the error online: HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED,” the Redmond company
confirms.
There’s really no big secret as to why this is happening. The truth is that Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 M3 does not play nice with either Windows Virtual PC or Virtual PC 2007.
Personally, I don’t think that Microsoft will work to fix this, and introduce Windows 8 support for Windows Virtual PC and Virtual PC 2007.
“To work around this issue, install Windows Developer Preview in a Hyper-V virtual machine environment, or use a supported third-party virtualization solution,” the software giant advises early adopters testing Windows 8.
Microsoft is stressing that the best way for early adopters to test Windows 8 is to deploy it
on a dedicated machine, or in a dual boot configuration, but not to use virtualization, at least for the time being.
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.
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