Installing Win7 on a Win8 Machine

Yes...if you do a clean install of 7 on an *8 machine it will wipe it completely clean. You do have the option of dual booting. You can partition you C: drive to the minimum GB of space to keep 8 and set the remaining GB space to from D: drive and then install 7 on that partition. It's a pretty straight forward process. Just when you boot up or reboot you will get the option to choose which OS you want to run.

Will the clean install of Win 7 mess up the boot manager or whatever such that I will be unable to recover the original factory installed Win 8?

Yes, it might.

You will have no trouble installing 7 to the win8 partition - leaving recov partition intact.

It depends how the oem set up accessing the recov proram.

There are a couple of ways round that.

First, make an image of the win8 partition- and the system partition. You can use any number of free tools for that.

If it is gpt - try the paragon backup and recovery free.

Second, run off a win8 repair cd/usb.

If the oem has a standard wim file in recov partition, you can boot the win8 repair cd and use system reset to apply the wim. Or you can use imagex/gimagex/any other wim handler.

Thank you BassFisher.

I understand you post but it doesn't quite do what I was looking for. Probably because I didn't pose the question clearly.

Here is what I think I am trying to do.

As the machine will probably come with one HD with a primary partition C: with Win 8 and another hidden partition containing whatever is needed to recover it to its original factory configuration if needed. (Such as returning it for repair of a hardware failure or just complete dissatisfaction with it.)

What I want is to have two partitions, one primary C: containing Win 7 and one other (perhaps extended) D: for data and finally the original hidden recovery partition. No vestige of Win 8 on the machine except to whatever is in the hidden partition.

Will the clean install of Win 7 do away with the ability to put the machine back into its original factory configuration?

I hope this clarifies the original post and I apologize for the confusion.

Thank you.

did you see the post above?

SIW2 said:

did you see the post above?

Yes, assuming you are talking about your earlier post. I saw it after I posted my reply to BassFisher. Wish I had waited before my reply for it answered my question completely. Can't imagine why I didn't think of it. Have used ATI for years and will adopt that approach.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome .

Good luck with it.

New machine might be using EFI/GPT.

I think you would need a pretty recent version of ATI if it is