Windows – Where does the Windows 8 Consumer Preview setup store its files

windows-8-preview

Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been launched and I wanted to test it out. So I downloaded Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/download.

But then I found that Win 8 is also available in .iso format. So I stopped the setup and started downloading the iso file. However, the Windows 8 setup had already allotted 2.8 GB of disk space. I want to free that space. What should I do?

I ran disk clean-up but nothing happened.

Where does the setup keeps the downloaded files?

Best Answer

While it is downloading the files will be stored in %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\Websetup

And after the download before the install you can find them in C:\WindowsESD

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Windows – How to resolve “we’re having trouble determining your PC Windows Consumer Preview”

I had this problem and had to do two things to get my USB flash drive installation to work:

Boot into Windows 7. Instead of running autorun or \setup.exe, run \sources\setup.exe. This gets around the "Something happened" issue you are seeing.
That got me further, but I got a dreaded meaningless error: "an error prevented a required compliance check from completing". All I did was go to the Windows 7 Disk Management (Right-click Computer, click Manage, then find Disk Management), and make sure my existing windows partition (that I am upgrading) is marked active. I right click it and click "Mark Partition as Active". (It may also need to be a Primary partition and marked as Boot, but that was already the case for me.)

(My setup: my USB stick was created by Apple's Bootcamp assistant using x64 Windows Consumer Preview, for my triple-boot Macbook Air that boots using EFI loader and then Grub for Win/Linux.)

Also, I don't know why I can't comment on the other answer, regarding corruption, but Microsoft provides the SHA 1 hases for the iso images right on the download page. (I used the convenient Windows Explorer properties window extension called Summer Properties to verify the hash.) (Oh, I just discovered I can't comment because I am riffraff who just walked in off the street: 50 reputation needed.)

Windows – VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED when trying to create a Windows 8 image in VirtualBox

Have you verified that the ISO image file containing the install for Windows 8 Consumer Preview has no errors?

You can find the different ISO image files and their corresponding SHA-1 hash checksums listed on this page: Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO images

Microsoft provides an unsupported command line utility whose description says it would allow you to check the Sha-1 hash for your ISO. You could also find other checksum tools by searching for them with Google.

Thought I would just relate what happened when I tried using my suggestion above. The Sha-1 hash listed on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO images page is

English 
64-bit (x64)  Sha 1 hash — 1288519C5035BCAC83CBFA23A33038CCF5522749 
32-bit (x86)  Sha 1 hash — E91ED665B01A46F4344C36D9D88C8BF78E9A1B39     
Product Key:   DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

The results I got from using the fciv utility on the ISO images I downloaded today from that site are

               SHA-1
----------------------------------------
1288519c5035bcac83cbfa23a33038ccf5522749 Windows8-ConsumerPreview-64bit-English.iso
e91ed665b01a46f4344c36d9d88c8bf78e9a1b39 Windows8-ConsumerPreview-32bit-English.iso

The Sha-1 hash for Windows 8 Consumer Preview (64-bit) which I downloaded a month ago (~ April 30), are below. I found it interesting that the hash does not match. In other words, Microsoft has apparently (silently?) changed the install ISO for Windows 8. I wonder what was changed? (And why?)

               SHA-1
----------------------------------------
737b33046dc5c9d4f3cf9a6f001ebf2d059afb21 Windows8-ConsumerPreview-64bit-English.old.iso

Best Answer

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Windows – How to resolve “we’re having trouble determining your PC Windows Consumer Preview”

Windows – VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED when trying to create a Windows 8 image in VirtualBox

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