Installing Win 7 Pro SP1 on a UEFI Class 3 Gen 10 Laptop

[ian50]

The laptop: budget HP15s i5-10210u, 16Gb RAM, Crucial P5 1Tb NVMe internal drive, 2 x USB-A 3.1 ports, 1 x USB-C 3.1 port, UHD620 video adapter, Realtek PCIe Family Controller, Realtek 8821CE PCIe WiFi Adaptor, Realtek HDA Audio, LAN cable port, HDMI port.

These specs were listed on the paperwork before purchase - though not purchased by me as yet. A colleague bought it for his wife about 4 weeks ago, then she decided on a Macintosh (yes, he was annoyed) so he's offered it to me on a discount sale and has watched me install Win 7 (on my own NVMe drive to preserve his sale asset if I decided not to continue).

Win 7 Pro SP1 is now running ok on this machine.

Two caveats up front: 1) although the screen/UHD620 adaptor are working ok at the highest 1920 x 1080 resolution, I cannot initialise Aero, no matter what drivers I've tried; 2) the touchpad is doing the basics - tracking the cursor and opening/closing programmes with the L/R bars, but that is all. No "gestures" or extended menu options.

Everything else seems to work ok with known, easily accessible drivers. In "Other Devices", Device Manager listed 3 "unknown" devices and 5 PCI devices (all with hardware ID info) that I'm tracking. [The "unknowns" and 4 of the 5 PCI's are now resolved - see updates below.]

Useful here is a USB boot Rescue disk prepared with Win10PE. This is very fully featured setup is freeware and can be found with a simple search. It has a Win10 Device Manager module that lists the hardware and specs from the Win10 perspective.

I've installed Win 7 on the Gen10 laptop using two different methods out of curiosity. Flashboot Pro patching for Win 7 boot off a UEFI machine worked straightforward with little effort but cost AUD$25. The freeware UEFISeven patching method also worked ok, but requires some care. The USB Win10PE boot was helpful there in enabling copying the final efi file onto the internal NVMe drive before booting Win 7 off it. This was needed as the UEFI BIOS has no built-in EFI shell on this budget machine.

Pitfalls: Secure Boot disabled (else Win 7 would not boot. W Keller on this forum has reported a successful boot with Secure Boot still on but I could not make that work); retailers are offering legitimate copies of Win 7 Pro *minus* SP1 for as little as AUD$30, but SP1 is an easily downloadable module with no cost; apart from the modified boot files to deal with the VGA Int10H issue, I only added the USB3.x drivers and the two MS NVMe drivers to the Win 7 ISO before installation using NTLite freeware modules to keep any errors trackable.

Perhaps peculiar to the HP15s is that when Win 7 successfully booted, Device Manager listed no Network Adaptors at all. Both the cable and wireless adaptors were simply not there, apparently non-existent. Yet the Win10PE Device Manager listed both of them as according to the specs at the beginning of this article. I had the Win 7 drivers for both the adaptors (these are used quite often in budget HP machines) but using the "find inf file" method of installation as an Update method just produced the "device not found" message, even though the Win10PE diagnosis listed them as present. So I clicked the Setup.exe file within the driver sets for each of the adaptors ... both installed and working perfectly in about 30 seconds. And then listed properly in Device Manager.

Pluses to this machine ? Definitely astonishingly fast, fast, fast !!

Update ...

I installed an older Intel chipset driver 10.1.17 (August 2018) - any port in a storm. This has a Setup.exe option and it did install using that. Although no action on the 3 "unknown device"was seen, it did load in a much larger set of information on each of the 3 plus a new and accurate set of ID nos. With that, I then found Win 7 driver sets for all 3 of the "unknowns" in the HP archives.

Seems I will agree to purchase this machine now.

Next update ...Found all missing drivers now bar one in the HP archives. The holdout is called PCI Simple Communication Controller - there is one older Win 7 HP driver that wants to install but cannot find a suitable inf file within the set. Maybe a simple declaration will do it - I'll comment if that works somehow.

Purchase now underway.

 

[ian50]

Additional comments since this installation (I've been distracted on some soft rock mapping issues):

1) the small external cases for an NVMe card to act as an external USB drive for, say, cloning currently use the uaspstor.sys driver and associated inf file. Win 7 cannot read this sys file as it is named as MS designed it for Win10 as a speedier solution to the earlier usbstor.sys.

BUT: if you just copy usbstor.sys as uaspstor.sys, Win 7 then just uses it as a USB Mass Storage Controller and installs it in the Storage Controller section of Device Manager. The uaspstor.inf file remains unchanged, of course. Just rename the original uaspstor.sys as uaspstor.sys.old or something first. A simple, happy workaround ending ...

2) More critically, one real issue with installing Win7 on Gen10, 11, 12 machines is that Win10 and Win11 do not need the older Win7 Int10h VGA interrupt (this is what Uefiseven etc is designed to overcome). One result of this, though, is that motherboard developers do not now need to make room in the memory and irq allocations for VGA arbitration for display adaptors. A similar situation applies to network adaptors.

This means that Win7 runs into allocation conflicts. The PCI to PCIe bridge in Gen10+ machines is not standardised - each manufacturer implements its' own solution. Commonly known as a Code12 problem (insufficient "resources").Since no developer is now reworking drivers to resolve this, the end-user has to resolve it. In Device Manager, using the view Resources by Connection, the conflicts can be found. To resolve them, I suggest a search for "Code12 solutions".

Nonetheless, installing Win7 on a Gen10+ machine will result in some Device Manager entries remaining unknown or permanently conflicted since there are no Win7 drivers at all. My suggestion is to disable these one at a time and observe results on reboot. If there is no discernable damage, you could then uninstall each separately, including the checkbox to remove the driver (else it just returns on reboot).