Ok let me get this straight, i installed win8 consumer preview on my PC....worked fine for a few days....but suddenly it started restarting everytime during OS boot....i didnt change any hardware/software but still i cant get it to work....on the other hand my hackintosh(sorry apple cant afford to buy a mac) works perfectly....searched everywhere but cant get a proper fix.... my specs: Core i5 2500k 3.3Ghz Asus P8 H77 M-Pro Motherboard 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM ATI 4670 1GB DDR3 Graphic Card (soon to be updated to ATI 6870) 500GB Primary Disk Running WIndows 8 as the main OS 160GB Secondary HD running OS X Lion 10.7.4 500GB External Backup Drive thats plugged into a usb 3.0 controller..... can any one solve it ?? btw reinstalling is not an option...did it once but same thing happened...
Turn on AHCI? I installed Win8 with AHCI ON. If I turn AHCI OFF in BIOS, I get a boot loop. If I turn it back on, it boots fine. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that your AHCI has been turned off in error. Worth a go I reckon.
First of all I'd try to boot from the Windws8 DVD/USB and start a command promt with SHIFT+F10. Try chkdsk and have a look at your disk's consistency. If the filesystem is whacked * you can go on with chkdsk /F. If everything's okay try to repair windows with the system file checker at the command prompt with sfc /scannow. Try to reboot and if everything's okay you're done. If not ... Try system restore to an early point ... if not ... You can install Windows 7 in a VHD and boot from it (google a howto). Then you can use vmware converter to convert the physical disk into a vmdk which should be bootable at least in virtualbox. Ugh! That's why I don't use Windows 8 as a primary OS. PS: I'm suggesting your harddisks are old!? If it's fact then think about a diskdump with ddrescue onto a fresh, big HDD * before chkdsk /F, or you could loose important data. Summertime is HDD crashtime.