I had some serious issues trying to install Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows XP Pro SP2 partition on my Macbook Pro. The installation would either keep failing, or tell me that it installed and then never run. So I had to find a new option.

I stumbled upon Andrew Odri’s blog post on how to install IE8 on OS X using a great program from Sun called “VirtualBox”. It’s a great alternative to programs like Parallels, or VMWare Fusion.

His interpretation on how to get IE8 on OS X worked pretty well for me, with a few exceptions. One of the biggest issues was that you had to install a specific version of VirtualBox to get the network adapter driver to install properly. I had an issue with this since that version would constantly fail on me during installation. So I installed the newest version of VirtualBox (3.0.4 at the time of this writing).

You can download that here.

After you get that installed, go to Andrew Odri’s blog post here, and follow all the instructions, with the exception of steps 13 and 14. He gives detailed instructions for step 6 in a comment below the actual post if you have problems with that step.

Once you have all of those steps completed, your virtual machine should be working properly, with the exception of the network adapter and the battery (you should have gotten warnings about the battery driver missing, and should still be getting them at this point).

To solve the battery issue, go to Start -> Right click on My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager. Select the “Batteries” list and disable any “Unknown Device”s to remove the warning. We won’t be needing the battery for the Virtual Machine anyways, obviously.

Okay, now to solve the network adapter problem.

1. If your VM is running, shut it down.

2. Bring Sun VirtualBox to the front, and select your VM from the list. Go to Settings -> Network while still selected. This will not work if your VM is running.

3. Under “Adapter 1”, go to the “Adapter Type:” drop-down menu, select “Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop”.

4. Go to this website: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=871

- you’ll be able to select your operating system from the menu, if you’re following this tutorial you’ll obviously select “Windows XP Professional”. Download the driver from the next page. Move the downloaded file to a folder on your computer that you are sharing with your VM.
 (Follow the previous post to learn how to share folders with VirtualBox).

5. Cold boot your VM normally. Open “Explorer”, and open the shared folder containing the .exe. It should be named “PROXP.exe”.

6. Run the installer and everything from there on should be taken care of. You will now be able to use new versions of VirtualBox and have a working network adapter. Run IE8 to make sure it works. Did for me.

AMD can cram it. This proves to me why I will always be an Intel guy. The Intel website was super easy to navigate, and finding the correct driver was a breeze.