Lenovo Flex 3 Laptop 1580 - Installing windows 7

Hello all,

I have a problem installing windows 7 on my new windows 10 laptop. I find it very weird how I change settings in the BIOS to support all legacy stuff like windows 7 and I try to boot from USB all the way to dvd and nothing works. What I mean is when it is done booting, it says " No drivers were found" and there's not a hard drive for me to choose windows 7. It's weird though because there are windows 7 drivers on the official support page, yet I can't install it?

I just need to see a hard drive listed but nothing pops up, and yes I've formatted it already using diskpart.


Thanks

Do you by any chance have your USB flash drive plugged into a USB 3 port? If you do, move it to a USB 2 port. USB 3 ports usually have a blue stripe across them, USB 2 ports are black. Windows 7 install media does not have drivers for USB 3.

TrustMe said:

Do you by any chance have your USB flash drive plugged into a USB 3 port? If you do, move it to a USB 2 port. USB 3 ports usually have a blue stripe across them, USB 2 ports are black. Windows 7 install media does not have drivers for USB 3.

Hello,

I have found a way to install windows 7 by using this:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/dow...reator-Utility

Now I have it installed but theres tons of missing drivers and no usb works and no wifi/ethernet. I think I'm stuck now.

Good job on installing W7. That's the problem of going backwards when your computer was made for W10. I hope you didn't blow away your OEM recovery partition or at least made a backup image of your hard drive.

Do you have access to another computer? I never tried this but I read good things. I hope your DVD is working, you can burn it to disc to get it installed.

https://sdi-tool.org
https://sdi-tool.org/download/

There are also free driver backup programs like DriverMax that will look for missing drivers and install them. For these programs of course you will need the internet. Be careful when installing DriverMax. It comes bundled with adware and or a toolbar for you Internet brouser. When installing, read each screen carefully and decline them. I think DriverMax will install one or two free drivers every day. There is a paid version that will install them all at once. I had good luck with is one. I upgraded a Windows XP machine to W10 and couldn't get the sound driver to work. DriverMax was the only program that found the right one.

There is another program called SlimDrivers that is about the same. Be careful installing this one too.

TrustMe said:

Good job on installing W7. That's the problem of going backwards when your computer was made for W10. I hope you didn't blow away your OEM recovery partition or at least made a backup image of your hard drive.

Do you have access to another computer? I never tried this but I read good things. I hope your DVD is working, you can burn it to disc to get it installed.

https://sdi-tool.org
https://sdi-tool.org/download/

There are also free driver backup programs like DriverMax that will look for missing drivers and install them. For these programs of course you will need the internet. Be careful when installing DriverMax. It comes bundled with adware and or a toolbar for you Internet brouser. When installing, read each screen carefully and decline them. I think DriverMax will install one or two free drivers every day. There is a paid version that will install them all at once. I had good luck with is one. I upgraded a Windows XP machine to W10 and couldn't get the sound driver to work. DriverMax was the only program that found the right one.

There is another program called SlimDrivers that is about the same. Be careful installing this one too.

Hi,

I do not have a dvd drive in the laptop (doesn't exist in this model sadly) and I have tried using my usb dvd drive, but no luck.

I currently have 2 usb sticks in my two, usb 3.0 ports. One of the sticks has the modified usb 3.0 windows 7 which can detect my HDD, and the other stick has drivers. I successfully installed the wifi driver but am now installing windows 7 to see if it will work. I notice that the system 1, 200MB partition went to 180mb and my file was around 20MB, so I hope it installs the wifi so I can use the driver update programs/or install drivers from the website.

Will get back to see how it does. I hope I'm doing this correctly, because when I installed the driver, no errors came up, it just went back to my hard drive page.

Thanks

At least your making progress. Good luck, keep us updated.

TrustMe said:

At least your making progress. Good luck, keep us updated.

Thank you :)

It blows me away how they make it so hard to make us give up on windows 7 for these new machines. I can't give up though, I have a long history with windows 7..

Speaking of making it hard for us. Wait until you start to update, it can take hours. It's a shame the way Microsoft crippled W7 updates.

TrustMe said:

Speaking of making it hard for us. Wait until you start to update, it can take hours. It's a shame the way Microsoft crippled W7 updates.

yes it sure is

ok windows is downloading updates right now

i have the drivers in here and i am on tablet mode which i do like like compared to 10 or 8 but i guess i have to take the bad as well

heres a picture of what it looked like when i was in tablet mode.