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Installing Win 7 UEFI on a Windows 8 Computer
So I recently purchased a Lenovo y480, along with a new hard drive to replace the rather slow 5400 rpm stock drive it came with (the new drive is a 7200 rpm Seagate if that is relevant). I wasn't a big fan of the time I spent playing around with windows 8, so I figured when I got the new drive I'd just put Windows 7 on there, along with Ubuntu 12.04.
I can get Win 7 to install fine in legacy mode, but I can't get it to work when installing in UEFI. Specifically, my install hangs at the "Starting Windows" screen. Here were the steps I went through to try and get it working on UEFI mode:
1) I enabled only UEFI mode
2) I disabled secure boot
3) I used the guide here:UEFI Bootable USB Flash Drive - Create in Windows to make a UEFI bootable USB drive. I used an .iso for Win7 /w SP1, and it installed fine while in legacy mode.
4) When booting from the USB, I go through a couple screens of "windows is loading files". When I get to the "Starting Windows" splash screen, it freezes up. This has happened several times, I allowed it to set there for a few hours as well just to make sure it wasn't trying to load up anything in the background.
I've tried a bunch of different tests (changing SATA from ASCI to compatibility, swapping out ram, disabling the wireless,optical drive,etc), but I still freeze on the "Starting Windows Screen". I was able to install Ubuntu just fine with UEFI enabled, it's just windows 7 that is causing the problems. This freezing on the windows splash screen seems to be a very common problem for installing UEFI from the quick searches I did, but no one on the web has posted a solution other than "Just use legacy mode".
As an aside, just how exactly are you supposed to reinstall windows 8 to a new hard drive? I could not burn recovery discs of any kind for windows 8, and the laptop didn't come with any. The only non-torrented .iso files for win8 require a product key, which is of course hidden in the bios and not accessible. OneKey recovery from Lenovo won't allow you to create backup discs either, and the image that it makes of the recovery partition (to potentially put on a usb? This option also was not available to me...) was nearly 30gb, which wont fit on any of the usb thumb drives I have. In the off chance that I actually wanted to try windows 8, how exactly do I get myself an install disc? Lenovo can potentially provide them but they aren't cheap, and it seems ridiculous to pay for something that should have come with the computer in the first place.
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