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I am at the point where I have no idea what I can try next after 4 hours of failing. I have tried following options enabled/disabled in ALL possible combinations:

  • Secure Boot ON/OFF
  • UEFI/LEGACY
  • AHCI ON/OFF
  • XHCI ON/OFF

I have an Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro "VN7-571G-51R8" which had Windows 10 pre-installed.

I came this far:

  • No bootable device found
  • Freez at "Starting Windows" after the "Loading Files" screen

Now, everything I try enabling/disabling in the BIOS, leads to "No bootable device found" so I guess I destroyed something? I am also trying this with 2 USB devices.

Is it possible that Windows 7 can't be installed if Acer don't want to?

Hennes
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Pali
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3 Answers3

2

Given the last comment I think I can now guess about the answer:

When a motherboard with EFI firmware boots it will try to do some of these things:

  1. Load a bootloader as pointed at by previously defined EFI system variables.
  2. Optionally boot in legacy mode
  3. Failing to find bootable devices, it will scan attached devices and look for an EFI boot loader.

You are trying to install windows 7 from an USB pendrive, which means the OS is not yet installed and 1) is not the case. We can either format a pendrive with NTFS, install a legacy bootsector and set EFI to boot in legacy mode, or:

  • Keep EFI set to boot in modern EFI mode.
  • Attach a medium with a filesystem which is understood.
  • Copy a bootloader to a standarised place in that filesystem.

Now this is where I think things went wrong:

  • EFI is not required to recognise NTFS, to format the flashdrive with FAT 32
    (Technically not FAT32 but creating an EFI system partition which just happens to be 100% compatible with FAT32)
  • Place the EFI bootload at \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI
    THIS IS NOT THE DEFAULT CASE WITH A WINDOWS 7 ISO.

Windows 7 sort of recognises EFI. The iso/DVD ships with the right driver. But it is not in the right place for a flashdrive EFI boot. You will have to find the file and manually copy it to \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI.

Finding it is not hard. It is in the install.wim file or if you have access to an already installed windows 7 system *EFI classic install) then you can copy and rename C:\Windows\Boot\EFI\bootmgfw.efi


having done this you should be able to boot in EFI mode and start the installer. There are two more catches though.

  1. Secure boot needs to be off.
  2. Windows 7 does not ship with drivers for USB3 controllers. Many modern board ship with USB3 only (e.g. all boards on the 100-series chipsets). That means either having a driver 'disc' ready, patching the installation drive or using a PS2 keyboard. Patching the installation is probably easiest and this can be done automatically for you with tools on the microsoft website.

(All found out the hard way when I tried a clean EFI install with windows 10. Except that I also had to use an USB3 flashdrive. With an USB2 drive the win10 installer complained about a missing driver, but told me that I could ignore that error if I booted from USB or from DVD. Grah!).

Ramhound
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Hennes
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2

Windows 7 doesn't support the new UEFI GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) and requires VGA option ROM (BIOS interrupt 10 (INT 10H)) to boot. Windows 8/10 supports GOP and read the Logo from the UEFI and displays it during boot for a smoother boot.

And it seams that your UEFI always turn GOP on and disables VGA when you select UEFI so Win7 can't be installed and hangs at Starting Windows with the graphic artifacts.

Glorfindel
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magicandre1981
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1

Let's start clean to avoid any errors. Use the official Windows DVD/USB Download tool to freshly mount your DVD/.iso onto the USB stick. This will also verify that there are no major integrity errors with the image. This can and will happen, so it's best practice to use the tool. http://wudt.codeplex.com

With Windows 7 and the WUDT, use BIOS/Legacy mode instead of UEFI. Enable CSM, enable AHCI, but disable Secure boot. Set VGA as legacy/default if given the option. You can choose whether to enable XHCI, but you should use a USB 2.0 port for the install for maximum compatibility either way. If the install fails, disable XHCI until Windows is installed.

If you want to use UEFI, you will need to use a 64bit copy of Windows and install with GPT partitioning, not the WUDT. The rest of the settings above apply.

During bootup, select the USB drive as your boot device. If you are not prompted to do so or the option is not displayed on your POST screen, you can manually select it in the BIOS.

After you've run the primary setup, return the BIOS to use the HDD as the boot device.

If the above fails, you may need to change some configurations to make the drive UEFI bootable for your system. Now that you've verified your image passes the built in checks of the Windows USB tool, you can follow the tutorial here to use Windows tools to make a bootable stick for your installation. I recommend 7-Zip as an archiving program, if you do not have one already.

http://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-make-uefi-bootable-usb-flash-drive-to-install-windows-8

If your image is the culprit, you can download a new one and use your product key with it. Direct download from Microsoft here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows7

Raj Huff
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