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Much awaited Windows 8 (Beta) Consumer Preview has been released yesterday (29th March 2012) at Barcelona, Spain, MWC (Mobile World Congress) event. Below video of 8 Min 13 Seconds length gives a quick glance of what is new in this release.

Useful links

Click here for Windows 8 Keynote video and demo videos on Microsoft Newsroom page. 

Note : Keynote video in the above link is of 90 Mins length

Windows 8 Home page here

A PDF product guide on Windows 8 from Microsoft is available here for download (~7MB)

Click here for Windows Experience Blog

Download latest Windows 8 ISO from here (~3.33 GB in Size for 64-bit) – Product key available on the download page below for ready reference needed during installation.

Windows 8 Beta Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

Follow this link here to create a bootable USB to install Windows 8

Note:-This is a beta release and not ready for production use. Many apps would work but few which are important and critical may fail. For me Cisco Anyconnect VPN failed to work :(

There are many tools available on internet that help create a bootable USB/Flash drive to install Windows 7. But if you are running Windows 7 we can use built-in tools like diskpart to create a bootable USB drive without any third party tools.

All you need for this is a Windows 7 or 2008 R2 machine, a USB Flash drive with minimum of 4 GB capacity (Note that all data on this drive will be erased), Windows DVD and privilege to run command prompt in elevated mode.

Note:This post assumes you have only one physical hard disk on your machine and no other USB disks attached

First attach a USB flash drive to your system and if auto run kicks in close all related windows.

Fire up an elevated command prompt, invoke diskpart by typing diskpart at the command prompt and key in below commands one by one

list disk

select disk 1

clean

create partition primary

list partition

select partition 1

active

format quick

assign letter=m

exit

This finishes the USB disk preparation. Now key in the below command to copy the installation files of Windows 7/8/2008/2008R2/Server 8  to the above USB disk. Replace X: in below command with path to Windows installation files on hard drive or DVD drive on your machine

xcopy X:\*.* /s/e/f M:\

When the last command finishes, a bootable USB disk with Windows installation files is ready