A little late to the party on this one. Two comments.
Although, he probably is no longer tuning in, I found the attitude of poster ShaneCurtis extremely lacking in graciousness (to say the least). Not only does he somewhat 'hijack' rwx's thread, but would make it appear that HE had discovered the key to his problem while in fact the solution to his problem was offered to him with GregRocker's very first post #56: "you may have to delete all partitions". Not very good form.
That said, Shane's 'solution' didn't ask a couple of pertinent questions as to how EFI might work. So to either he or the crew here: What is the implication of windows 'needing unallocated space'? This must be to create an EFI partition for Win 7. But then, if I understood his initial plan of attack, he wanted to keep his original Win 8 recovery/set-up (not clear). Does this mean that theoretically he would now have two EFI partitions (one each for 7 & 8)? I'd thought that the EFI partition was large enough to accommodate two or more boot scenarios. Or at the very least the Win 7 install would overwrite Win 8 EFI partition. Would we have expected the same behavior had Shane been trying the reverse: install Win 8 over Win 7? Partly due to the poster's hit-and-run problem solving approach we don't know. Could also very well be that this is part of Microsoft's Windows clampdown that is intentionally made to make life difficult for those who wish to escape the entrapment of Win 8 Maybe Greg or Og already have answers to some of these questions...and, by the way, as I've suggested before, would be a little research project you guys could test at home as well.
