Win 8.1 and VMware

I specced my new PC with Win 7 Pro x64 on a 120GB SSD with a 1TB WD HDD for data. It's a dream system but I also wanted access to Win 8.1. and have been attempting that in VMware. Win 8 installed and activated in the VM just fine and after all Win 8 updates had been installed it duly offered me the Win 8.1 upgrade. But that fails every time and when I run the troubleshooter it tells me that I'm missing a necessary partition. It then reverts me to Win 8.

Has anyone else had any experience with this?

 

Can't say I have, but then I installed 8.1 from an ISO.

 

I wasn't able to do a clean install as the only unused 8 key I have was one of the very first cheapo upgrade keys. That gets rejected if I clean install so I had to install Vista and then upgrade to 8. The upgrade was problem free, as is 8 itself, but seems I'm not going to get 8.1. Proof again that a clean install beats upgrading every time.