Windows 8 Consumer Preview cannot complete setup (1st. gen envy)

After two days struggling with this I decided to give up, but i'll post my experience here in case someone knows about a fix.

A few months back i managed to install windows 8 developer privew after a few attempts by manually loading the drivers for the HD 4830 (sp48247.exe) found here.

This however does not work with Windows 8 Consumer Preview. When I try to load the drivers it says that it couldn't load them and i need to get new ones. In any case setup fails after "Getting devices ready 86%" with one of the two symptoms:

- black screen forever
- BSOD CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT

If i try to restart and go into windows 8 one of the two following things happen:

- BSOD PAGED_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
- if no BSOD it goes further and a dialog box lets me know that the previous attempt to install windows failed and i have to install it again

Needless to say, installing it again just repeats the same cycle. I've wasted an incredible amound of time with this, i've even opened the laptop to remove some of the memory as read in some other places, nothing does it. It appears it's the end of the line for my faithful 1st. gen Envy.

 

I got the same issue. It is very time consuming and frustrating. Hopefully, the Release Preview that should be out in June will fix this.

 

I notice that you mentioned about the HD 4830 driver which used to cause issue in Windows 7. I did some research and looked at how people solve the similar issue ( Windows 8 Forums.

What I did is to copy all working HD 4830 driver files from Windows 7 and replace those files in Windows 8 foler (e.g., windows\system32 and so on). It looks like HD 4830 driver files come with Windows 8 are not working properly.

After I did that step, Windows 8 CP now works like a charm! But you have to make sure that you don't allow Windows 8 Updates to update your HD 4830 driver otherwise you won't be able to boot again.

Hope this helps!