Hi, All,
I'm trying to fix a laptop for a friend of mine. It's a new Toshiba Satellite laptop. The model # is S875-S7376. When she ordered it online, it said it came with Windows 7. When she received it, it had Windows 8 on it (only).
She called Best Buy, and they shipped her a Windows 7 Home Premium Disc and told her to set up a new partition and install Win 7 on that. This is where I come in.
I repartitioned the C Drive with no problems. I created a 400GB partition for Windows 7, which shows as healthy in Disk Management. It is marked as active.
When I install Win 7 on that partition, however, it gets 95% of the way done and then hangs. It stays at the "Starting Windows" screen for hours and won't go any further. When I hard-power-down and reboot, I get a black screen with the option to press F8 for further information about why Windows 7 won't boot up. I then get a message that says, "The O.S. couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors." The missing file is, apparently, Windows\System32\winload.efi. I've checked the Win 7 CD, and there isn't a scratch on it.
I disabled Secure Boot in the BIOS prior to installing Win 7. I've reformatted the new partition and tried the install again, to no avail. The Windows 8 O.S. boots up fine and works great.
I'm baffled here -- anyone have any ideas? I'm wondering if it has something to do with UEFI? (Which I admittedly don't fully understand.)
I'm trying to fix a laptop for a friend of mine. It's a new Toshiba Satellite laptop. The model # is S875-S7376. When she ordered it online, it said it came with Windows 7. When she received it, it had Windows 8 on it (only).
She called Best Buy, and they shipped her a Windows 7 Home Premium Disc and told her to set up a new partition and install Win 7 on that. This is where I come in.
I repartitioned the C Drive with no problems. I created a 400GB partition for Windows 7, which shows as healthy in Disk Management. It is marked as active.
When I install Win 7 on that partition, however, it gets 95% of the way done and then hangs. It stays at the "Starting Windows" screen for hours and won't go any further. When I hard-power-down and reboot, I get a black screen with the option to press F8 for further information about why Windows 7 won't boot up. I then get a message that says, "The O.S. couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors." The missing file is, apparently, Windows\System32\winload.efi. I've checked the Win 7 CD, and there isn't a scratch on it.
I disabled Secure Boot in the BIOS prior to installing Win 7. I've reformatted the new partition and tried the install again, to no avail. The Windows 8 O.S. boots up fine and works great.
I'm baffled here -- anyone have any ideas? I'm wondering if it has something to do with UEFI? (Which I admittedly don't fully understand.)
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