I got my hands on my brother’s awesome 15″ Macbook Pro and seeing the 500 GB hard disk, I decided to try installing Windows 8.1 on a small 50 GB partition.
After an evening wasted, I realized what the problem was. After scouring the Apple forums, I realized that I have to give Windows an unformatted 50 GB space to do with as it pleases, since any other format (NTFS included) was greek to the OS. So I did just that. Turns out, Windows split that space into 2 partitions – 1 49 GB disk with NTFS format and 1 200 MB disk with Mac OS Extended format.
Now, here’s the thing. Mac supports NTFS, no matter how reluctantly, but Windows has never cared to understand Mac OS Extended. Why then, it was formatting that small segment in that format, I know not.
The end result? Currently, I have Win 8.1 in a VM.
Update: God knows why, but I tried again, this time with a different ISO and a different approach. If there’s one thing that’s consistent about Microsoft, it’s their inconsistency. The process failed in a whole new way. I’m done with Bootcamp. VMware wins my money. Now and forever.
If you are running the VM in OSX, try parallels. It’s similar to VMware but gives you a lot more amazing features. eg: I have windows 7 on my bootcamp partition, but I can access that partition as a VM while on OSX using parallels. There is a coherence mode, in which you can access the Windows7 applications without loading the desktop. You can have the windows7 taskbar and the MAC dock on the same screen if you want. IE and safari running side by side.
@Gopal Thanks for the idea. My brother is a big fan and proponent of Parallels. He’s got it installed for those few moments when he needs Windows. I like VMware because I’ve stuck with it for long and because I really like their fusion mode as well as the ability to load a VM on to a USB and run it anywhere, on any Host OS. I’ll be looking into Parallels for sure, but I’m sure not going back to bootcamp any time soon…
Thanks for the suggestion!