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How does windows 8 booting work?

Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
I'm trying to replace 8 with 7 on an Acer Aspire E15 Touch laptop, but no matter what, the minute I turn it on, it's still going straight to 8. In fact, at one point I did a shut down but it was taking too long to shut down so I just hit the power button and turned it OFF. When I turned it back on, it went back to "shutting down!" How in the world? the system was completely turned off! It's like if the windows session is staying in the ram somehow so even turning it off does not bring me right back to the bios and just starts back where it left off. I managed to get to the bios and forced the boot order, but it still refuses to boot off anything and just goes straight to windows 8.

Is it partially embedded in the bios/system or something? Will I be able to even put 7 on this thing?
 
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when you hit "power" it probably went to sleep/hibernation. you need to hold the power button several seconds to actually power it off, most likely. like 7 or 8 seconds. that has been normal for years.
 
Yep I was holding it down till I heard the hard drive turn off and saw all the lights turn off.

I managed to get it to boot into Acronis though, I had to disable UEFI boot and put it on legacy mode. Now the odd thing is Acronis is not even seeing the drive at all. What a strange laptop. Never seen this before. I'll have to try clonezilla or other tool. At least I got it to boot now.
 
Depends which version of Acronis you got. Some won't see the GPT partitioned drives.
But yeah, Windows 8 saves state to hibernation file. Best way to turn it off is actually to do the reboot.

If UEFI is on, it limits what devices can be used to boot from. Then if you switch and leave it in legacy (non-UEFI mode), the partitioning created by Windows installer won't be GPT.
 
Hmm so it uses a completely different disk format too? So if I go ahead and format/repartition and install 7 over this drive I will then be ok to Acronis it after?

Can I take the drive out and DD it from another machine, or does the GPT format actually alter the drive's flash/firmware?

I'm more concerned about imaging after I did my work, but it would not hurt to take an image before I touch it, in case things go south.
 
Red Squirrel said:
It's like if the windows session is staying in the ram somehow so even turning it off does not bring me right back to the bios and just starts back where it left off. I managed to get to the bios and forced the boot order, but it still refuses to boot off anything and just goes straight to windows 8.
Click to expand...
Yes, it uses a hybrid boot (not a cold shutdown) and secure boot by default.
 
Can I ask why to switch from 8? Is it program compatibility or something else?

As others have mentioned, it would be well-advised to have a copy of the original OS (might want to do back to 8 someday), and you will beed to tell the BIOS to run legacy in order for 7 to access the drive.
 
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Want to switch AWAY from 8 and not to 8. It's not for me, it's for someone else.

Now the only thing I'm not sure about is how does the GPT stuff work, is that something that is embeded right in the hard drive firmware? Ex: if I put the drive in another machine will it be able to read it so I can take an Acronis backup or is the drive pretty much pooched as far as being able to read it outside of UEFI mode? If I boot in Acronis I can't see the drive at all. In fact now that I'm in legacy mode it wont even boot. I'm guessing it would if I switched back though but don't care about booting, I just want to back it up before I wipe it.

Edit: booted up with a Linux CD, it sees the drive, but in gparted it can make out all the partitions but in fdisk it can't. Weirdest thing ever. Think I'll just play it safe and dd the drive. There's some really weird stuff going on. will it work to just wipe the drive and put 7 and will it act like a normal drive now that I'm in legacy mode or is this something to do with the drive itself?
 
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I got a dd session going now, it's awefully slow though, like 12MB/sec lol. Something odd with this machine. When I do kill -USR1 to see progress it does not even come up right away. Messed up. I'll leave it be and come back tomorrow to check it. Heading to work.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Hmm so it uses a completely different disk format too? So if I go ahead and format/repartition and install 7 over this drive I will then be ok to Acronis it after?

Can I take the drive out and DD it from another machine, or does the GPT format actually alter the drive's flash/firmware?

I'm more concerned about imaging after I did my work, but it would not hurt to take an image before I touch it, in case things go south.
Click to expand...
You got all the answers in link that ketchup79 has provided. So GPT is really about the partition table, formatting is the same. Disks with GPT partition table will work on any modern Windows.
 
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