Installing Windows 8 RTM on a Retina Macbook Pro

I thought I would capture my experience installing Windows 8 RTM on my Macbook Pro (the new Retina version with SSD).  First I must say that I am enjoying my Macbook much better now that I have an SSD in it.  Computers without SSDs are just painful to use these days especially as a developer. 

For the most part the upgrade went exactly like any other upgrade.  That was good.  When I booted up the first problem I ran in to was that the Trackpad drivers for the Mac wouldn’t load and I couldn’t load the Boot Camp Control Panel (weird error about not being able to access the startup disk).  I looked in Device Manager and found that there were two Trackpad devices registered, but they couldn’t start.  So I decided to start with those first two items and resolve them.  Thankfully the Internet is a wonderful place, full of all sorts of answers!

Issue #1 – Not being able to access the Boot Camp Control Panel

The essence of the solution was to run the Boot Camp Control Panel in a different UAC security context

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/59048/macbook-pro-retina-and-windows-8

Issue #2 – Trackpad wasn’t working

The solution is simply to map the drivers to USB Input Devices and then back and magically it works (weird I know!)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4048548?tstart=0

Issue #3 – Windows 8 Enterprise kept complaining about activating

From the command-line you access a UI that allows you to enter in a key that is valid which is what was causing this to complain in the first place.  This may be because I used my MSDN account to install Windows 8 Enterprise (I am doing that to test it out at my employer for those wondering about the license concerns there).

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itproinstall/thread/3dac08f3-5212-4318-9e02-cfd7ea5b581d