Installing Win7 on an MSI MEG Z590 ACE

Use the update and drivers attached at the bottom of all my posts.

USB3_Win7_2021 Integrate into boot.wim image 2 and winre.wim image1 as well as whatever image in install.wim

My updater would have done all that for you.
Update your Win 7 installation media

Alternatively, get a win10 installation media and replace sources\install.wim with your updated win7 install.wim.
That way you will be using win10 boot.wim

But you will still need to integrate the update and drivers mentioned above into your win7 install.wim and preferably also into winre.wim

the disk needs to be gpt partition style to access more than 2 tb.

Install win7 in efi mode.

csm is required for win7 efi boot. Only win7 x64 ( also called amd64 or 64 bit ) can boot in efi mode

If you want to access the full capacity of disks over 2tb, you need gpt partitioning. Which is fine for a storage disk if you are booting windows in bios mode from an mbr disk.

However, if you want to boot windows from a gpt disk, you should use efi boot.

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It is not all that complicated.

bios boot:

bios finds the bootable disk from the mbr code with an active marker. ( the mbr is not inside a partition it is at the start of the disk )

bios hands control to the mbr executable code.

the mbr code hands control the the pbr ( sometimes called vbr ) code on the active partition.

The pbr code starts up bootmgr.

bootmgr has a look in the bcd store to find out where winload.exe is.

then he starts winload.exe and with a good following wind, windows will appear as if by magic.

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efi boot:

bios ( or more accurately the efi firmware) searches for an efi folder containing the efi version of bootmgr
\EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BOOTMGFW.EFI

then it hands control to bootmgfw.efi which has look in the bcd store to find out where winload.efi is.

there is less chainloading and it doesnt need a partition marked active.

However most bios ( or more accurately efi firmware ) will only look on fat32 formatted partitions where it expects to find the efi folder and contents.

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Partitioning:

The usual gpt/efi boot setup as a minimum is a small fat32 formatted "efi system partition" at least 100mb which is where the efi folder lives. Because that is what bios ( or efi firmware) will be looking for.

The efi system partition has a special ID which is C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B. It is important because some essential tools like bcdedit won't find it without that ID

And a large ntfs formatted partition for windows.

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If you use windows setup to do the installation, it usually also creates a tiny msr partition ( unclear what that is for and it is not essential ) and also a separate "recovery" partition where it deposits winre.wim. But it not a requirement to have a separate "recovery" partition, winre.wim can live happily on the main windows partition.

This is the ms picture of how it looks in a typical installation using windows setup.exe to do the installation to a blank disk



That is the gist of it. It is not necessary to know all of the long words and technical details.

I usually initialize the disk to gpt and create the esp/msr and windows partition using diskgenius . Free version is fine. It is very good and I recommend it for os migration ( sometimes called cloning ) and plenty of other things
DiskGenius Download Center | Free Download DiskGenius

Then apply the windows image to the the windows partition and populate the esp partition using bcdboot command. I am too lazy to bother to with dism or wimlib commands to apply the windows image, so I use dism++ for that part. It is handy for a lot other things too. There arent any instructions, but it is easy to figure out by clickng around on the options and dropdowns.
https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/Dism-M....1.1002.1B.zip

here are just a couple of the things that can be done with dism++

Dism++ add updates and drivers

Backup the activation



I prefer win8/10/11 bcdboot because they have the /f switch which is useful across modes. Cant do that with win7 bcdboot.
bcdboot-selection.zip

The command goes like this:

bcdboot windowspartitionletter:\windows /s esppartitionletter: /f uefi or bios or all

e.g.

bcdboot d:\windows /s z: /f uefi

it is not necessary to assign a letter to the esp partition, it will accept the device path instead \Device\HarddiskVolume12 or whatever it is for the esp partition.

Alternatively, winntsetup is an easy gui for the job, but you still need to create the partitions first. It has some other useful abilities for anybody a bit beyond beginner. JFX has used a customized wimlib.dll in v533 so dont try and update that file
winntsetup