Windows 7: Installing Win7 on a Win8 Machine

It has been many years since I have had a brand name Desk Top. I think it might have been a Tandy 1000. See what I mean about many years? I have put together many of my own or had a local shop put one or two together. I will be faced with getting an additional Desktop machine sometime next year for a family member and expect it will have Win 8 installed.

I will want to install Win 7 on the Win 8 partition but will want to retain the factory installed Win 8 recovery partition for reasons I find it hard to explain right now. 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?

The above is moot if I can find a new machine with Win 7 on it rather than Win 8.

Thanks for any help.

Hello mate.


Just install to an Extended partition / Logical drive and all that is of no concern at all, a simple right click / delete will remove Windows 7 with no startup repairs at all have a look through the information in this tutorial at the link below for some ideas.

Partition / Extended : Logical Drives

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.

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?

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

Sorry mate I assumed you wanted to dual-boot; good to see you found a solution.