windows 7 in uefi on acer w700
This acer w700 while a great machine has an absolutely terrible UEFI firmware and I mean the worst. there is no csm mode not even a provision for booting the msata ssd in uefi and being able to boot legacy flash drives without entering the setup and changing to legacy mode. Absolutely stupid! The issue is windows 7 need what is called int10h which cms mode provides. We dont have csm so e basically have a class 3 uefi bios because we have no csm mode, even though we still have legacy.
check out uefiseven which is a fork of vgashim started to be able to load windows 7 onto mac's with only uefi firmware and no legacy or csm modes. The newest version is 1.23t so far and I can attest that it will boot into the installer of windows 7 getting past the windows logo that it normally hangs on.
The next issue that I'm still having is that as soon as you get to the installer it freezes and there is 0 control. Everyone says its usb driver related but I have tested many usb drivers by slipstreaming them into the iso before hand and it behaves exactly the same way. no matter what usb driver is slipstreamed.
I believe the issue is actually the ide/atapi controller as it will not install at all.
I have cloned a windows 7 install to my msata while still having windows 10 installed and it used to get stuck on the windows logo also then i used uefiseven and it still fails
i have used windows image updater which will take your iso and update the setup.exe to a windows 8 or 10 version, slipstream all the drivers you could imagine, download and integrate all windows 7 updates you iso lacks, and creates a nice new iso for you. the result: boots uefi fine, installs for first wave, reboots and you have to catch it before it tried to boot into the part of the installer on the hdd/ssd now to finish the setup. at this point you install uefiseven into the efi partition and it will boot into the installer again (if you fail to install uefi at this point then it will hang and corrupt the install leaving you to restart the install from the beginning.
I have tried swaping the windows 10 boot.wim from the windows 10 x64 iso and copying it over the boot.wim in the windows 7 x64.iso. The result: boots uefi fine, gets to installer with mouse and keyboard support but immediately says a driver is missing and allows to browse the msata for it BUT wont install drivers. I tried every type of driver just for the heck of it. what happens is the drivers will not install but not error out either, it just says no new device has been found. I believe this is because its not the type of driver the installer is looking for so it doesn't need it. i believe this because when you go to install the sata ahci controller (which would be the controller listed under ide/atapi in device manager) it will give an error saying it cannot install it vs all the other types like usb3, video, audio, etc just kick back out and say no new devices were found.
I've been trying to load windows 7 in uefi on this tablet/slate for probably 5 years or more now. I have windows 10, ubuntu 18.04, android x86 8.01, and mac osx 10.11 (fully functional due to me coding some kexts and dsdt files), all in uefi on a gpt drive. Yet I cannot manage to get windows 7 on this machine to
save my life so far.
so heres a few ideas that I cannot try due to possible data loss or destruction of parts of the device. I cannot format the msata in the w700 due to massive amounts of data and days worth of re-setup time. mac osx 10.11 took me a month to get working and yes i have it all the kexts and dsdt files i made or edited etc backed up but none of the setup of the programs and customizations are so id have to do that for all the operating systems that i listed as being installed above.
I also do not want to take this slate apart again, it was very difficult to swap the msata, and the screen is as thin as paper. I'm surprised i didnt break it the first time (i swapped in a 1tb msata
) so I'm not about to do it again (unless the msata dies) to swap in an empty or donor msata to try these ideas.
the ideas:
Install windows 7 in legacy mode (which it will do I had a friend who had the same exact w700 and he converted his msata to mbr and switched to legacy mode in the bios and it installs and works fine), get all the driver information from device manager, download or extract the drivers from the windows install using dism and keep them on a usb for when you format the driver and convert to gpt to install windows 7 in uefi mode. This may or may not work...
or:
Install windows 7 in legacy mbr mode, convert the drive to gpt with a hard drive utility program such as paragon hard drive manager and then copy the efi partition files including uefiseven to the newly created efi partition from the gpt conversion. This may or may not work...
The issue is I cant test it. Id appreciate it if someone could install windows 7 in legacy mbr mode and pull the drivers or get a hold of me and i we can connect via teamviewer or vnc ect and i can pull the drivers and also provide you with the efi files you need. Lets get windows 7 installed in UEFI on the device already!!
