Things to have on hand
- BootCamp CD
- find it, burn it whatever
- USB Mouse
- if you are using a wireless, Bluetooth mouse your drivers will or may get jacked up when you make the upgrade cause mine did.
- Time!
- Overall upgrade , depending on what you have installed etc., could take a couple hours.
Upgrading in place
This was a pretty standard process. I downloaded the RTM from MSDN and burned it to DVD, made sure I wrote down the key and slipped in the DVD and hit the go button.Standard wizard upgrade, nothing to dis-similar from the upgrade process from Vista to Windows 7. Screens are quite nice.
They great thing here was, I only had one or two reboots. BUT! that's when the fun starts.
Boot Camp Stuff
Once you go through the who are you, what wireless / network screens and you get through the logon screen. Please DO NOT reboot!I did that and lost my keyboard, ugh the pain! If that happens here is the work around.
In the lower left hand part of the screen there is the usability icon, click on this and enable the "On Screen Keyboard". Please be patient as again, depending on your configuration the responsiveness may be latent. Once that appears, either use that or in my case the keyboard was enabled at least for me to login.
Next steps.
- Uninstall Boot Camp from Windows.
- Do not repair. This can install additional copies of the Apple drivers and further send you into frustration. And in the end you will uninstall anyway.
- Insert your Boot Camp CD and run the installer.
And that's it. I would mention that these are my suggestions based on my experience and I am fully operational on a MacBook Pro 13" 8GB Ram running Windows 8 Pro and loving it.
Biggest issue for me was getting the trackpad to work, which lead me to uninstall Boot Camp and reinstall. This was a result of having the multiple copies of the drivers as I mentioned above.
Thanks for the step by step. i will give it a try once i burn bootcamp and windows onto a cd!
sry but that didnt helped me in getting the trackpad 2 work.
@vishesh trackpad drivers should be updated from apple within the next month. I have seen the current ones work here and there, its not reliable.
i have mac pro (2010) and had refit efi boot setup and windows 7. downloaded win 8 from msdn and did an inplace upgrade to win8 - just extracted iso adn double clicked setup. Windows 8 installed, but the video driver seemed to be the basic one...used it for awhile and rebooted and now i cant get into refit menu (holding C, X, option on bootup doesnt take me to mac boot menu). instead it goes directly to windows 8 and it tells me unable to access boot device.
tried repairing and a few other advanced options from win 8 boot menu (bootcfg etc) no luck.
What are my options? i have an old OS X 10.6 dvd, but no 10.7 lion dvd (i think i purchased it online). no windows 8 dvd either....is there a way to repair and recover the boot stuff?
I won't make the upgrade as I find Windows 7 as stable and complies with my needs. Windows 8 is too simplified with my needs. Plus my fleet tracking software won't run in 8.
read through it but did not do it the way (I had already been through process). So the status is, I have windows 8 working. Everything works except all possible ways to right click and the function (fn) key.. Problem lies I think in where I formatted the partitioned drive using windows installer. So, what next? Leave right click but fn key is required!