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I attempted to follow Fred’s instructions only to be foiled when I got to the point of “Installing Android -X86 to harddisk. At that point repeated attempts resulted in the same screen message that is shown in Alex post number 30 below.

There was no way to get to the point where I could create a new partition. I even removed the VirtualBox to start over but when I arrived at the point of installing Android to harddisk it failed again.

I ran into the same thing but attributed to the fact that I am running on Windows 8.1 and could not open the Acceleration tab (grayed out) to set Enable VT-x.

See my posting below regarding my experience with Blue Stacks.

I have two different HP Intel laptops, one a few years old and the other one brand new and running a Core i7 chip.

As others have noted, the Virtual PC software does not run properly in the Windows 8.1 Environment. After trying on both laptops, where the Acceleration tab is grayed out, I finally gave up and installed Blue Stacks. This does install and run but is horribly slow, even on the i7 laptop. Also, the apps do not seem to run well at all, Skype, in particular, does not log in properly, and after getting in with an emailed code, it shows the account but none of the contacts. There is not even a place to tell Skype to load them. Trying to log in again from the Skype login screen just fails again. I think the integration with Windows, rather than being a plus is a big negative. Even though I haven’t yet seen the Virtual PC running, I think it would run much faster as it is taking over more of the system itself and not fully relying on Windows integration. Hopefully, they are working on a Windows 8 (8.1) update.

I enjoyed the article and have one of those disk cabling kits. My problem is that I have a disk drive from an HP Pavilion laptop. It is a SATA drive but the drive pushes down on the contacts to engage so none of the standard connectors fit. I’ve searched but cannot find an adapter cable that the drive can plug into with standard SATA pinning on the other end. Anyone have a handle on where I can get one of these? Do they even exist?

I don’t want to destroy the drive, just transfer the data to another HD disk drive and then reuse this one.