A further investigation into getting Windows 8 Preview on to a HP Touchsmart TX2 (Lazarus) involved putting a blank hard disk in and re-running the install to rule out previous failure was to do with Windows 7 being on the machine already. In this particular model of tablet there is an adapter for the sata connection on the drive that needs to be transferred and then the unit can be re-assembled.
After the drive was installed – I once again experienced the black screen and flashing indicators of previous blogs here , here and here. I found that the hairdryer approach worked fine and even used the cooling on the hairdryer to cool machine after it booted.. So I am actually more convinced that the issue is related to bios or other settings that seem to get corrupted when machine fails to boot or config is changed. Removing the cmos and main battery had no effect.
On reboot an F5 / F6 message appeared about corruption of cmos settings. Using F10 to enter bios and reset date and time and change boot order allowed the machine to boot and start the install process. It seemed much quicker than the previous windows 7 upgrade attempt and after approx 35 minutes machine was running Windows 8.
The windows 8 beta driver for the touchscreen is available on the NTrig site. The install does leave a lot to be desired as it still appears that the machine and some of the features are not recognised by the preview. Given that the tablet worked well on Xp and find on windows 7 – its a bit surprising that it has so little support in windows 8. My guess is that Microsoft will focus on newer hardware with tablets rather than touchscreen laptops as its target install base.
Any how – just to say its possible to get Windows 8 installed but you may want to use a spare hard drive and retain the working config you have on another harddisk to go back to