Windows 7: How to downgrade lenovo pc to Win 7 after upgrade to Win 8??

Hello Friends,

I upgraded my Lenovo Ideapad Z 570 to Windows 8 a couple of days back. But the new OS is a pain. it has slowed down my system substantially and also some reference memory......terminated kind of errors are also displayed frequently. may b this is coz i did not do any BIOS upgrade before switching to Win 8. Was i supposed to? Tried calling the customer support and they asked me to contact microsoft about the problem.

Whatever..what i want now is to go back to my previous win 7 and would appreciate if you people would guide me. i saw a discussion on the same topic in the forum for an acer pc, so would be glad if you help me out as well.



I have never run any backup or anything. data is not much important anyway.just some movies etc.
i have the win key on my laptop, but there's no cd.

Pl help.

PS: Located in India..if that makes any difference to the kind of updates available.

Hello ankitkr and welcome to Seven Forums.

Couple of questions. When you upgraded did you do a clean install (format the entire hard drive), clean install (format only the C: partition containing windows 7), or something else like dual boot? Do you know if your Lenovo still has a hidden recovery partition containing the original Windows 7 and other factory installed software? A screenshot of your Disk Management would be helpful to see how your hard drive is configured and what you have to work with.

How To Access Disk Management in Windows 7

Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

Thanks for the response..a snapshot of disk mgt has been attached...no it wasn't a clean install..while upgrading i simply went to the microsoft site..registered..downloaded the upgrage assistant...and then ran the application. after 5 gruelling hours, the assistant completed the upgrade. Also i chose the option to keep my personal files, settings & application while upgrading.

when i opened the control panel now,i saw a icon Windows 7 File Recovery. Does that mean the Win 7 files are still available? i dont know anything about any hidden recovery partition.

According to the screenshot you provided, you have a 14.75GB partition called the OEM Partition. This should be the partition that can restore you computer to factory specs. According to the Lenovo user manual for the Z570, you should have something called the OneKey Rescue system installed on your computer. See Chapter 4 for more information. (NOTE: You can test the OneKey Rescue system first by seeing if you get a screen that let's you choose between restoring your system partition to the original factory status, or to a previously generated backup.)

Z570 User Guide

I'm not sure about the control panel > Windows 7 file recovery icon. It may be your personal files that were on the computer when 7 was installed or it may be something else. You could always open the applet and see what it contains. If you have any other files, apps, programs, etc on the computer that are important to you, definitely back them up before you attempt a factory restore because everything will be erased.

Just as another possible solution, you could always download an official Microsoft ISO file for the original version of Windows 7 that came with your computer. Save it to your desktop and then burn it to a blank DVD. That gives you the install media to do a clean install.

Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO from Digital River « My Digital Life

Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7

Clean Install Windows 7

Thanks for the help man...think i will go for the clean install of win 7 as the one key recovery appn is not running. it shows the same refernce..etc error. Anyways thank you very much.

Good luck with the clean install. You should see a noticeable improvement in performance without the factory installed software. If you have any questions along the way don't hesitate to ask.