Installing Windows 7 From Windows 8 - No Disk Space?

Hi All,

I recently installed Windows 8 to have a look over it to decide whether it was for me or not. After a week or so of playing around with it, I have decided that I'd prefer to roll back to 7. However, when trying to do this, I have not had much success.

I've booted from a USB Drive (that I have used before with success) and attempted to format the win8 drive & delete the partition. So far so good. I've then tried to create a new partition and install win7 onto it. This is where the issue begins. I successfully create the new partition, however when trying to click 'next' from the 'Where do you want to Install Windows?' screen, I'm presented with the error:

Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition see the setup log files for more information

After doing a bit of Googling I found it may well be the case that the partition creation tool is a bit shonky, and that it was worth using DISKPART instead. So I tried this, yet found this on the list disk step:

Disk # Status Size Free
Disk 0 Online 931GB 0B
Disk 1 Online 119GB 0B
Disk 2 Online 298GB 100MB
Disk 3 Online 372GB 1024KB
Disk 4 Online 7500MB 0B


(apologies for the rubbish table, postimage does not seem to like my image, or Linux... )

I have tried:

• Removing all Unnecessary HD's
• Creating a new USB
• Formatting & re-installing Win8 (this works without incident)

I can't see anything untoward in the system logs, but I'm no expert. Happy to get screenshots if anything thinks it will help.

System Details:

Asus M4A97 Evo
AMD X6 1100T Black Edition Processor
6GB DDR3 1333MHZ RAM
AMD 6790 1GB Graphics
128GB SSD (Install Drive)
320GB HD
400GB HD
1TB HD

No overclocking of any kind on the above components.

All help appreciated!

Thanks for your response. My sole objective here is to get a working copy of Win7 installed and working by any means. I'm not looking to dual boot or anything fancy like that, just get something working. :)

I have done what you have suggested, yet unfortunately I'm still in the same situation. Please view the below workflow and advise if you believe I'm missing anything.


I've removed all drives but for the SSD, as requested.
I still find it a bit weird that the 'free' column is displaying 0 bytes. Can anyone explain why this is the case?

Gone through the disk part steps... Everything looking good so far.


Boom. No joy. Not a peep.


This piqued my interest somewhat. Why is it even giving me the opportunity to upgrade. I [i]still[i] think there might be some variety of Windows 8 boot manager caught up in here somewhere, but I'm unable to prove or delete it.

Anyone have any further thoughts? By and large I'm out of ideas.

Work through the steps for Overcoming Windows 7 Installation Failures - Windows 7 Help Forums

It may be in the stick formatting, so when you get to that step I'd write it over again just to be sure.

If all the steps fail without missing a single one, then I'd test the HD with maker's HD Diagnostic extended CD scan, followed by a full Disk Check done on the partition you create.

OK, well I'm writing this on a perfectly serviceable Windows 7 machine, which is currently beavering away downloading system updates, so the issue has been fixed.

I believe that the issue here was, as Greg suspected, the stick formatting. I attempted to re-format the disk using Rufus to a UEFI compatible format (GPT), however for whatever reason my copy of Rufus was not displaying this as an option. (Possibly because I was working off a Windows XP backup machine?)

At this point I was reasonably sure that this was having an impact and was doing some further reading regarding workarounds and such. After pfaffing around with a couple, I decided that the issue was to do with the stick, and that I couldn't fix it. I nipped out to Staples and bought a few DVD+Rs and figured it might just be easier if I abandon the whole stick idea and go with a CD. At least this way I could rule the media out.

Armed with some DVDs I tried to use the Windows USB ISO tool to create a boot disk. However it was having none of it. I don't really know the reason why, but I gave up pretty quickly with this and thought about alternative solutions. In the end I made a LiveISO of Ubuntu, booted that up and burned the ISO using K3b.

I booted off this disk successfully, and wrote directly to the formatted partition that I had made yesterday. Happy days.

So, in conclusion; for anyone having issues similar to mine whereby they're coming down from Win8 to Win7, my advice is simply to abandon the USB idea and burn an ISO to a bootable, physical DVD. Of course this won't work if you don't have a DVD writer to hand, nor if the machine you're trying to set-up doesn't have an optical drive, but if the option's there, take it.
Also, don't rule out the concept of using a Linux Distro to dig yourself out of a hole. It may be possible to create a functional GPT formatted Windows 7 USB stick through Ubuntu or similar. I haven't tried, but I dare say it's do-able if you're keen/desperate enough.

Either way, thanks to the chaps above for pointing me in the right direction regarding UEFI issues. :)

Did you try Rufus from Option One of UEFI Bootable USB Flash Drive - Create in Windows?

When the Windows 7 USB-DVD Download Tool is fussy about the ISO, use ImgBurn - Website Official Download use Mirror 7.

Thanks Greg,

Indeed - I did try to go through Rufus, in the second setting in the Rufus main page, I did not get an option for 'GPT partition scheme for UEFI computer'. I was given the other for both UEFI/BIOS, which didn't work.

I wonder if it was due to the fact I was running XP on that machine.