Starting to Preview Windows 8

As almost everyone I know with a drop of the “technological blood” in their veins, I’ve been playing with the Windows 8 Developer Preview over the last few days. All fine and running in a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009). Only two issues, which I’ll try to present a solution for below.

The first and main issue is that, as most people, I’ve installed Windows 8 in a virtual hard drive, as per the guide by Scott Hanselman here. Had enough disk space, and set the maximum size to 60,000. Installed and played for a while, and then got back to the Windows 7 environment. However, while there, I got some temporary content in the disk that would prevent the Windows 8 from expanding to 60,000MB, should it need to. I didn't think that would be a problem: so far the VHD used only about 10GB, and there were about 40GB of space. Yet, the very next time I tried to boot, I got the error: VHD_BOOT_HOST_VOLUME_NOT_ENOUGH_SPACE. After 3 reboots, the error resolved itself, but that probably was done reverting the boot record to boot only Windows 7. My suspicion (unconfirmed!) is that the Windows 8 loader tried to expand the VHD to the maximum size, just for the sake of trying. When that failed, some code somewhere should be throwing an exception and causing this, even if that space is not really needed at that moment.

The solution for this, at least for me, was to reinstall Windows 8 (something I wanted to do anyway). This time, instead of creating an expandable VHD, I created one with fixed size. Basically, follow the instructions from Hanselman, and instead of:
create vdisk file=d:\VMs\Win8.vhd type=expandable maximum=60000
use
create vdisk file=d:\VMs\Win8.vhd type=fixed maximum=60000
The disk space will be reserved for the VHD, and there will be no chance for this issue to happen.

Meanwhile, let’s consider one of the reasons for me to consider reinstalling Windows 8. During my first install, I used a Live Id account as my administrator account. All was fine and working, except that when back to Windows 7 I was not getting any e-mail via the Outlook Connector for Hotmail. When trying to send and receive just that account, I noticed the error message:
Task 'Live account' reported error (0x8DE00005): 'This account does not have permission to synchronize your mail. To sign up to gain permission to synchronize with this account, please go to http://ideas.live.com and join the notification list for this Windows Live Hotmail product. You will be notified when your account is enabled. Error: 3202. Server HTTPS is turned on for the web but not for this program.'

This looked very strange. I did absolutely nothing to change any settings manually, and things were working perfectly until I installed Windows 8. Just for the sake of trying that, I went to https://account.live.com/ManageSSL, logged in with the Windows Live Id I used for Windows 8 and saw it was now using HTTPS by default. Changed that setting to ‘Don't use HTTPS automatically’, and… everything started working again. In the long term, I should probably resolve that with an update of the Outlook Connector. For now, I have more of Windows 8 development to explore!