For my New Year’s Eve festivities this year, I decided to stay home and try to finally get my Windows 8 install done on my desktop PC. After some more trials and tribulations, I’ve finally got that done, and the PC is booting into Windows 8 now. Remembering what I went through with my ThinkPad clean install, I know that I now need to go through all the excitement of applying many Windows updates, rebooting, then getting Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store, then installing that, then more Windows updates. So I’ll probably be done with that around midnight. Then, I can start setting up software and copying files back over from my backup drive tomorrow.
I think this thread at the Microsoft support forums contained the solution to my upgrade difficulties: I had to switch my SATA mode from AHCI to IDE in my BIOS. (I’m hoping I can change that back at some point, but I’m not going to try it until I’ve got myself fully upgraded to 8.1.)
I’m hoping that this was worth all the trouble. I think it will be. The end result should be a nice clean Windows 8 install, free of the HP cruft that originally shipped on this machine, and all the various layers of accumulated cruft that has built up since I bought the machine in 2010.