Let the VM boot and then select “Next” and follow through the instructions to install Windows 8, the virtual machine will automatically reboot and load Windows 8 when it is finished.Click on “OK” to return back to the VirtualBox main menu, click your Windows 8 VM again, and then click on the “Start” button to boot the virtual machine.

Select “Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file…” and navigate to the Windows 8 Dev Preview ISO file you downloaded earlier – this tells the virtual machine to boot from that iso image so that you can install Windows 8.

Next look for where it says “CD/DVD Drive: IDE Secondary” and click on the little CD/DVD icon next to it.

Now click on the “Storage” tab and look for “IDE Controller” on the left, click on the “Empty” slot under that.

Now click on “Processor” and check “Enable PAE/NX” so that it is enabled.

Choose the “System” tab and first under “Motherboard” check the box next to “Enable IO APIC” to enable it.

You’ll now be at the VirtualBox boot screen, so select your Windows 8 virtual machine and click on “Settings”.

Choose about 20GB from the disk size selector then click on “Create”.

For disk storage, choose either “Dynamically allocated” if you want an expanding drive or “Fixed size” if you want to just set 20GB and forget it – this choice doesn’t matter much.

Again click on “Next” and choose to “Create a new hard disk” then select “VDI” as the virtual disk image file type.

Click on “Next” and allocate RAM to the virtual machine, I chose 2GB because I’m using the 64bit version, but you can go with more or less.

Launch VirtualBox and click on “New” to create a new virtual machine, give it a name (Windows 8 etc) and select “Microsoft Windows” as the operating system and select “Windows 7” as the version.

This was tested in Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 but will also work in Windows 7 and Linux, and probably any other place VirtualBox runs: Installing & Running Windows 8 in VirtualBox

You’ll notice the setup is a bit more complicated than using VMWare, but we’ll walk you through everything so just be patient and you’ll be up and running in no time. Put the Win8 ISO somewhere you can find it easily, and install VirtualBox before proceeding.

VirtualBox – download this free from Oracle.

Windows 8 Developer Preview – download this free from Microsoft Dev Center.

How to use virtualbox on windows 8.1