• morphballganon@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Reformatting my Windows 11 machines and replacing the OS with Windows 7 is on my (very long) to-do list

    • maccentric@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      I had a hard time even installing Win10 in a Win11 machine (doesn’t see the drive, couldn’t find drivers for it).

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        10 months ago

        I purchased an NVMe m.2 drive recently, installing it into my MB that is older than the format. Installing an OS onto that was difficult to say the least, but honestly not that bad. I had to find drivers for it online and inject them into a copy of my MB’s BIOS, which luckily my MB saves a backup of the last working version so it wasn’t a risk when flashing the edited version onto it. After that it worked perfectly, and I’m sure the same can be done for whatever drive you were having issues with. It probably took no more than 30m after I figured out what the issue was to solving it. It felt scary, but it was fairly trivial with guides online.

        Admittedly I’m comfortable with computers and was installing Linux. I have no idea if Windows would throw a fit for some reason.

      • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        You need to find appropriate storage driver that you then load during install (extracted in *.inf format not *.exe)

        Possible alternative is to disable some proprietary storage related feature in BIOS / UEFI so that you would use standard drivers that are included in install. UEFI update might help as well. Usually there is a guide for all this.

    • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Have fun with the same pain, this time because Microsoft doesn’t want you to use Windows 7… Because… profit.

      • fossilesque@mander.xyz
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        10 months ago

        Probably a security issue or two… (…and they wanted to bake in data harvesting deeper into into the OS)