Installing Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013 in VirtualBox

I've been annoyed at the fact that I haven't been able to follow along the examples in the MVA courses and other tutorials that deal with writing HTML5 and Javascript in VS because you need to have Windows 8 to develop in those languages (Windows Store Apps). So I finally got around to downloading Windows 8.1 Pro and VS 2013 Ultimate from Dreamspark. Fortunately for me, the Harbert School of Business is a Microsoft Alliance partner (or whatever), so they were free. Whoohoo.  I've installed plenty of operating system in VirtualBox before, so I was hoping this would be an easy process (and a beautifully brief post), but alas, it was much more interesting (read frustrating) than I'd have cared for.



So after creating a new virtual machine in VBox for Windows 8.1, I attached the 32bit version of the Win 8 install disk and fired it up.  No way will it be this easy right? Indeed...

Great, probably some sort of problem with the way the CPU is configures. Well anymore you don't get a whole lot of options, so I turned off PAE/NX. What the hell, right? So then I get this:

Yeah not a real big surprise. Time to start looking around for a solution.  On thread I found suggested you need to run a couple commands from the prompt to configure VBox right, so I tried that:

Tried it again and the same result.  A bit more reading and come to find out that Hardware Virtualization Technology (VT) needs to be enable via the host system bios for all this to work right. So, I go try and fix that:

Ok, so enabling this was big. This has GOT to be the problem, right? Nope, same error as before. So wtf?? Tried the 64bit version and it tells me "Sorry stupid, you don't have a 64 bit processor". Ok fine.  I'm just about at my wits end, going to try VMWare or something else. Maybe I need a different version of VirtualBox.  So I go to the VirtualBox download page and no, it's just one version for both architechtures, but I do see that there is an extension pack available. Could be worth a shot right?

Ok, so one more time into the breach, and...

Success! Hallelujah. The installation from this point is pretty vanilla, if you've done this once you've done it a hundred times:

VBox did have a bit of a hiccup when it tried to restart...

But when it started back up, all was well:

So, the hard part was finished, now it's just a matter of putting VS 2013 on there, which went without a hitch:

I didn't track how long it actually took to install, it felt like a friggin hour, but then it's finally ready to start and I get this screen (seriously, MORE preperation??):

Until at long last, jackpot, Javascript apps in Visual Studio:

So now I can get rolling with the training guide for exam 70-480. Also look forward to playing around with codeSHOW(), now that I'm done with all the classes [frustrated eyeroll]... ce la vie.

[edit 2/20/2014] Just wanted to note that I repeated this process on my Lenovo laptop running Fedora 18 and after a considerable number of updates (including updating VBox to 4.3) I was able to repeat this process with no issue.