downgrade windows 8 to windows 7

G

GtrsRGr8

New Member
Hi. I'm new here. And, I don't know all that much about computers. I think that johnb35 may have answered my question partially, but not completely.
I have a Win 7 laptop that is barely hanging on. The hard drive is good, though. I just bought a new laptop, with Win 8.1 (ugh), thinking that I could pull the hard drive from that machine and drop the hard drive from the old machine right in and everything would work just fine (seeing that it involves PC computers, I should have known better). Well, I got a message something like "boot device not found . . . . install boot device . . . . blah, blah, blah." I put the original hard drive (with the Win 8.1) back in the new laptop and the new laptop boots fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Oh, why do I want to use the old hard drive? 1) avoid having to transfer data, reinstall programs. You know the drill. 2) Have Win 7, not Win 8.
 
You have 2 problems.

1. You can't boot to a windows 7 install from a different computer that the operating system was installed from. The 2 systems have different hardware and it would either boot loop on you or bluescreen because of the wrong hardware being detected.

2. In order to even install windows 7 on a machine that previously had windows 8 on it, you have to change some bios settings. Disable secure boot and enable legacy boot.

So either way, you will have to reinstall windows but the problem is, you may not be able to find and install all drivers needed for windows 7.
 
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