For those who can’t wait to try out the latest Consumer Preview of Windows 8, but are afraid of loosing their existing Windows 7 or Windows XP installation – here is a quick guide which will walk you through installing and dual bootin Windows 8 with your existing windows installation. In this tutorial I will be installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview while keeping my existing Windows 7.

System Requirements

1. Minimum of 1 GHz processor
2. Atleast 1GB of RAM (or 2GB for 64-bit)
3. Atleast 16GB of storage (or 20GB for 64-bit)
4. A DirectX 9 graphics card with WDDM 1.0 support

Step 1: Pre-requisites

1. Create a 20Gb NTFS partition (atleast, because Windows 8 needs 16 Gb to run) on your HDD and keep it aside for windows 8. I personally created a 60Gb partition so that I could play around with installing application etc.
2. I would recommend that you download the free personal edition of EASEUS Partition Manager to partition the hard drive.
3. Get a spare DVD or a 4Gb USB drive.
4. Download a copy of Microsoft Windows 8 Developer Preview by clicking here.
5. A small executable will be downloaded within a few seconds. Run this executable.
6. Before you download, the tool will tell you which applications and devices will and won’t work (see screenshot below)
   
7. Hit Next and and the product gives you a key – Note it down. Now, it will start downloading Windows 8 on your system. Depending on your internet speed, the download should complete in 10-60 mins.

Step 2: Installation

1. After the download completes, you will be prompted on the installation screen to select one of the option. Select Install on another partition.
2. Click Next and you’d be asked to select out of a DVD and USB on which to burn the Developer Preview installer
   
3. Select whichever option you prefer and click next.
4. After the DVD burn or USB write is complete reboot the computer.
5. Enter BIOS and check the boot preferences – make sure you are booting from the DVD drive/USB before the HDD.
6. Post that, it would be a standard installation. When kind of installation you would want to select Custom and choose the partition we created in Step 1.
7. Enter the serial key that you would have noted down in Step 1.
8. After installation completes, reboot and you would be able to dual boot Windows 8 and Windows 7/XP.