Help me say goodbye to Windows 8. Win7 installation issue.

So we’ve finally decided to abandon Win8. Nobody likes it. So I bought a copy of Win 7 Pro through school and need a bit of tech support. There is nothing on the HDD that isn’t backed up elsewhere. How do I completely wipe out 8 so I can start fresh?

Thanks

The installation should ask how you want to allocate the drive space; unless you’ve got a specific reason to do otherwise, tell it to use 100% of the disk as the C-drive, do a Quick Format and that will totally wipe the drive prior to installing Win7.

It gets to the opening sequence, then fails at creating temp folder(s) or something like that. The specific error is 0x80070490. I looked that up but it seems to be a fairly common error.

I was thinking it would be easiest to just format the entire HDD and start fresh, but not sure how to do it in 8.

You should boot to the Windows 7 DVD to install, not run setup from 8. Which did you do?

I set the BIOS to boot from DVD then HDD, but it still went to 8. I called MS support and they said to just install it and call back for an alt product key to get it going.

You probably need to turn off UEFI on your computer before trying to boot from the install DVD.

I’ll give it a shot Mangetout

Mash the F12 key repeatedly after you start from a cold boot (from power off) and select the DVD drive once the boot menu appears. Select a custom install, delete all the partitions on the drive, then tell it to install with the empty drive selected.