Downgrading Windows 8 to 7 is getting harder every day. [View all]

[Phillip McCleod]

I've now done about 8 downgrades on various hardware.. 2 for us in the shop, and 6 for clients of the shop. So far it's been a snap. Just edit BIOS to boot with 'legacy BIOS' instead of 'UEFI', reformat the drive 1 partition NTFS with a GParted LiveCD, and reboot into the Windows 7 installation DVD.

On Dell hardware.. most of what we do as a 'Dell Partner'.. the rest is as easy as it gets. Reboot and 3/4 of the time the Driver Update Dance is a waste of time. It's all there and ready to go.. plug-n-play.

Two days ago, though, I got a commercial-grade HP ENVY dv6 (Core i7) and the owner hadn't used it at all because, well, Windows 8 is unusable. 'Let's do it,' he said, when I suggested a downgrade.

Turns out there's NO so-called 'Downgrade Path' for the latest line of HP computers. They have an exclusive contract with Microsoft and have practically hardwired their machines to *only* run Windows 8. They urge the world not to downgrade, even if they have Windows 8 Pro installed on them (for which Microsoft itself has provided a downgrade path).

Well, I don't use the Downgrade Path anyway. Linux is a Windows Tech's Best Friend. The specs said Legacy BIOS would boot Win7 on the HP ENVY dv6, so I forged ahead. I backed up the client's data and wiped the drive. 'Snap snap', I thought, as everything seemed to be going according to plan.

Then I tried to load Windows 7. A lot of our clients are professionals and retirees and they want their machines fixed, and we get some modicum of carte blanche to get things done. The Downgrade Path, I'm sorry.. it's for amateurs. What we do is purchase licenses on the fly, and we keep some handy for various versions and OEMs to speed things up. Basically, this means I can try several versions of Windows 7.. Home Edition, Pro, Ultimate.. using Trial Licenses to see which is going to work best with *that* hardware, and when I get it working, I pop in the Windows license #s and voila.. it's ready for a couple days worth of updates and driver tweaking and blahblahblah.

Failure on all three counts. Ultimate wouldn't install at all. Pro installed.. finally.. but for the *strangest* reason I could not fathom, I was unable to Activate it. Fuck. Our policy is not to waste time, so I stopped banging my head against the wall, rebooted into GParted, zeroed the drive overnight from the command line using 'mkntfs', and installed Home Edition in the morning.

Turns out that did the trick. There was a hidden reserved partition that HPs version of a Legacy BIOS kept.. I guess.. telling the Windows 7 installer to create, and as a result, even though I could load Win7, I couldn't license it!

Right about the time I was thinking, 'I guess Microsoft just doesn't want our money if we're only buying Windows 7' .. light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

I've whittled the list of missing drivers down to one PCI controller' and one SM Bus controller by using Windows 8 and HP Presario i7 Windows 7 drivers. Plus I went to Intel for the graphics chipset and updates. It's like the bad old days of installing XP on a Vista-made Toshiba.

Hard to make a profit this way, but it's a public service.