You didn't go far enough. It'll ask you if you want to upgrade or full install on a second partition. You do need to have the second partition ready in advance.

Also, Ross, if this is your ONLY laptop, I would be extremely careful about this. Maybe best not to do it at all, on your main rig.

Hey Jorge, I have Winstep Xtreme 11.6 installed in Win 8 and both NexStart and Workshelf installed without issue... as did Nexus.  As far as I can tell everything works as it should.  I've created some shortcuts in Workshelf... all are working okay.  I've fiddled with Nextstart and all seems to be working there also.  However, I've not long installed it, so there may be kinks I haven't encountered as yet, but should I find any I'll post here with the glitch/issue, okay.

Oh yeah, the going to bed bit... didn't happen... damned insomnia.  It's now 7.58am and I'm not even slightly tired... got a second wind about 3.40am and that was that as far as sleep went, so I figured I'd make myself useful and install WSX

YAY Jorge!!!   

I'm not familiar with Winstep. Is it an alternative to Objectdock? (looks that way??)

Stardock is fast....I just got this and now, here I am!

Oh, and thanks RND, i might check it out. Cheers!

Well it seems that I have done something wrong... when I perform a restart in Win 8 I get a message at boot saying that it cannot be started, that a file is either missing or corrupt.  Win 7 still boots as it should but not Win 8. 

Now I can boot back into Win 8 if the disc is in the drive, but not otherwise, so it seems there may be something wrong with the MBR and Win 8 hasn't registered correctly or something.  I haven't invested a lot of time or effort into it so I'm going to reformat as the repair options have not restored the ability to boot without the installation disc in the drive.

Oh well... later.

(((hugs)))

Of course, at the end of the day Winstep and Stardock *are* 'competitors', but in a healthy and friendly way... and it's been like this for the past 12 years. Over the years Winstep has been a little bit like Stardock's baby brother.

Anyway, competition is 'a good thing', gives people choice and prevents things from getting stale. Stardock keeps me on my toes, and, knowing Brad a little bit, I'm almost certain he enjoys the 'competition' too... At least I hope so.

Well I dunno, did a reformat and I still have the issue of Win 8 not booting without the disc.

I used the Win 8 Customer Preview Setup exe to download the file, which checked out to be complete, etc, then during the installation I selected 'Install to a different partition'.  I was then instructed to save the ISO to burn later, which I did, but during the subsequent installation booting from disc, there was no option to select dual boot, just the standard installation for a single OS machine.  Upon completion, however, both OSes were present on the boot menu, and again, Win 7 booted okay but Win 8 would not boot without the disc being present... so something f**ked up and I have no idea what.

So, it's back to the drawing board for now.

Well I have no idea what it is I have to do to get Win 8 rebootable without the installation disc on-board.

I tried a different partition because I felt there may have been issues with the SSD I first tried, but it will not reboot on a standard HDD partition, either.

The error I get is....

File: Windows\System32\winload.exe

Status: 0xc000000f

Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.

Now this is in a clean install of Win 8 x64 with nothing added whatsoever... just what was on the installation disc.

I followed all the steps during installation and it seemed to complete without issue, but the one thing I did not see was a dual boot option.  I read an article that stated an option to change various defaults and settings would appear towards the end of the installation, and from there a dual boot configuration could be selected, but that did not occur... well not that I could tell.  Just prior to the log in page a screen appeared with some network and other settings on it, but it was gone before I could read all that was on it... which also happened the previous 2 times

Now I'm running the installation from bootup and selecting custom install to choose the partition, etc, as I always have for clean installs, but obviously I'm doing something wrong.  If anyone can advise as to how I can fix this I'd sure as heck appreciate it, whether it be another clean install using different steps or something, or maybe using one of the repair options to replace the corrupt or missing file.

Anyhow, this ol' pirate be tired as buggery now and be g'wen t' bed.

Also note that if you shutdown from Win7, upon reboot you'll see an ugly black screen with white text to choose your OS from. If you shutdown from Win8, upon reboot you'll get a pretty blue screen offering two OSes to choose from.

Just a note.

You misunderstood me. You get the screen with OS options when booting into it, not out of it. Only if you are dual booted.

This is when you first boot up after installing 8.