Question WINDOWS 7 SUCCESSFULLY INSTALLED ON UEFI PC WON'T BOOT

[waghela]

LENOVO IDEACENTRE 14ARE05

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 4600G with Radeon Graphics 3.70 GHz

Installed RAM: 32,0 GB (31,3 GB usable)

Storage: 2TB SSD M.2 2242 PCIe NVMe + 2TB HDD 7200rpm 3.5"



OS Dual Boot in SSD M.2 2242 PCIe NVMe: Windows 11 (1500 GB) and Windows 7 (500GB)

I made a 500 GB partition on an SSD disk where it runs Windows 11 and installed Windows 7.

After installing Windows 7 the computer restarts and Windows 7 boots up, but it doesn't progress to the desktop restarting and repeating the restart until I stop.

Windows 11 continues to run smoothly.

You can see the steps through the screenshot of the attached pdf.

 

[DaaQ]

Probably drivers needed, and IIRC there were not many if any M.2 drives back in the 7 days? Plus chipset drivers.

How did you make the win7 media iso? with windows media creation tool or something like RUFUS?

 

[waghela]

Probably drivers needed, and IIRC there were not many if any M.2 drives back in the 7 days? Plus chipset drivers.

How did you make the win7 media iso? with windows media creation tool or something like RUFUS?

I created the installation media through the RUFUS application and made a change that I saw in a tutorial on Youtube that allowed me to install the operating system in UEFI machine that however does not start.

 

[DaaQ]

I created the installation media through the RUFUS application and made a change that I saw in a tutorial on Youtube that allowed me to install the operating system in UEFI machine that however does not start.

Is the MBR partition the same format for both OS installations? ACHI or GPT?

 

[Shmee]

The NVMe drive should be initialized GPT, for both installs. It sounds like this was already done, otherwise I don't think either OS would install in UEFI mode. The MS NVMe driver should already be there, otherwise the Windows 7 installer wouldn't be able to select the NVMe drive to install. As for Windows 7 not successfully loading after install, what exactly happens when you restart the computer? Have you tried going into safe mode? It could be some chipset driver is missing, and hanging at start or something.

 

[DaaQ]

The NVMe drive should be initialized GPT, for both installs. It sounds like this was already done, otherwise I don't think either OS would install in UEFI mode. The MS NVMe driver should already be there, otherwise the Windows 7 installer wouldn't be able to select the NVMe drive to install. As for Windows 7 not successfully loading after install, what exactly happens when you restart the computer? Have you tried going into safe mode? It could be some chipset driver is missing, and hanging at start or something.

To piggy back off of this do you have the bootloader option to select 11 or 7? Sounds like you do but just went through installing 11 on an old i5 750 to recover the corrupted 7 boot drive.
I would imagine 7 might not know what to do with the newer chipsets.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I had this exact same problem with my MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max. MSI has Windows 7 drivers for my exact board. I tried installing Win7 in UEFI mode and even though everything I read says you can I couild never get it to work. I ended up switching back to MBR and booting in Legacy boot mode. That limits me to a 2 TB boot drive but that's not much of a problem. When I dual boot it will be with Linux.

 

[Torn Mind]

Make sure the usb stick is not a bad one. Some can store files but the storage is already compromised when read.

That can mess up the install. It actually happened to me

 

[tcsenter]

More likely the problem is installing Windows 7 in UEFI mode on some systems seems to be more troublesome than others. UEFI supports booting from MBR or GPT doesn't matter. But if legacy BIOS/CSM, it can't boot from GPT partitions, only MBR.

 

[mikeymikec]

My old PC (Haswell era) would install Win7 fine in UEFI mode but a particular update would cause a message to appear on-screen telling me to disable secure mode to boot IIRC. When I did that, it would boot properly again.

 

[tcsenter]

Not many advantages to UEFI or secure boot other than some little extra measure of security. No performance benefits or other features rely on it.