Upgrading a Windows 8.1 VM to Windows 10

So now that Windows 10 has been released, I thought it was time to do more than just "play" with the Technical Preview.

My victim candidate was the Windows 8.1 VM I have on my Macbook Pro for dev and demo work - if it all went pear shaped then I could just blow the VM away and start again.

Issue 1 - I didn't have the "Get Windows 10" icon on my start bar

This has been bugging me for a while, as I've been expecting that to appear automagically over the past month. But it's been stoicly absent. Turns out that if you've got a domain joined PC you'll get the GWX app with the relevant KB 3035583 update, but it'll not work.

So the only way forward was to download the ISO and run the update from that.

Issue 2 - You need 9.5GB free to install Windows 10

Typically, I had less than 1GB free - until Disk Cleanup showed 5GB of Temporary files and 4Gb of old installers - better than trying to change the size of the physical BootCamp partition my VM was on.

Installing - was actually pretty easy

About as painless as any other Windows install / upgrade - the install worked fine, letting me sign back in to complete the process... and then

OMG - Black Screen!

It was all going far too well - there had to be a hitch... 

rammesses Slightly worrying that my #Windows10 upgrade has been stuck showing a black screen for the last 20 minutes. Cursor moves, so still #Hopeful 29/07/2015 14:37

It seems several people have had this problem when a PC (virtual or otherwise) boots for the first time into Windows 10. There's a thread here about it - but the upshot is that you just need a reboot!

In VMWare Fusion I just triggered that from the Virtual Machine menu and I was back... but only at 1924x768 resolution.

Drivers!

There wasn't anything I could find on the web indicating whether the Bootcamp and VMWare Tools drivers would work with Windows 10 - so I crossed my fingers and gave it a go... and it worked!

All that was left was to tweet that I'd succeeded... 

rammesses#Windows10 running under #VMware Fusion on a MBP in #Retina resolution - #Done http://t.co/30Oeh2lfWM29/07/2015 16:11