Downgrade Acer S5 391 533 14G25AKK windows 8 to windows 7

mihaio2002

Hello,

 

I am trying to downgrade a brand new Acer S5 windows 8 to windows 7. Unfortunately, this proved to be a bigger issue then I thought. I have put a Windows 7 image on a bootable USB stick (after disabling Secure boot...) and when I hit the partition screen I found no more then 5 of which 2 OEM (Reserved), one System, one MBS reserved and one primary. When I tried installing windows 7 on the primary partition I got the message that it is not possible because of the fact that it is a GPT partition. Went on to create a bootable Gparted usb stick but after booting in it when I choose the Gparted Live default option the laptop restarts and boots in the same Gparted menu again. Basicaly it goes like this in an endless loop... Can someone help me downgrade this laptop to Windows 7? Did anybody try and succeed? If yes can he share some pointers?

Thank you in advance,

Mihai

 

[edited for privacy]

leader95949

Am about to do the same with my Aspire 5560G. Found this which I haven't tried but it looks to be on point.

 

The Microsoft Windows operating system offers 2 architectures for partitioning disk drives into usable areas to store data. The 2 approaches differ with how they track the mapping of physical disk sectors to logical block numbers. The original method of partitioning disks is referred to as MBR (Master Boot Record) which was developed during the 1980’s. Although widely accepted, this scheme has many shortcomings including partitions being limited to 2TB (terabytes) in size.
As disk capacity has increased to over a terabyte, a new partition architecture developed in the late 1990’s called GPT (GUID Partition Table) was created to accommodate the larger partition sizes. In addition to size, GPT disks also offer more partitions and greater resilience to corruption.

(More: http://www.petri.co.il/gpt-vs-mbr-based-disks.htm)

The problem is, that the ACER Aspire 5560G model somehow (don't ask how {maybe BIOS related?}) can't shut down properly (freeze) when the OS is installed in a GPT partition style. Because of the 5560G is a UEFI/EFI based system, Windows can only be installed to GPT disk. If you manually convert the drive to MBR during installation (Shift + 10), it won't work, because the Windows installer will say: "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks."

The solution is a little bit weird. (don't ask why)
If you DON'T press a key during the "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD..." message when you boot, the Windows installer will install the OS in MBR partition style and the notebook will work without any problem.  

http://0.tqn.com/d/pcsupport/1/0/b/4/-/-/windows-7-star...

If you already have an OS on the HDD/SSD, the Win7 installer won't boot (even, when you set the CD/DVD drive first in the boot sequence in the BIOS) because you doesn't pressed a key during the message (see picture above), so the installed OS will load. You have to run the installer as normal (press a key during the message) and when you reach the part where you can partition / delete / format the drive, press delete on every partition you have. You should see something like this (unallocated space):

http://0.tqn.com/d/pcsupport/1/0/d/5/-/-/windows-7-inst...

Then quit from the installer (its possible that the system will freeze during reboot) and re-run the Win7 installer with the above described "don't press anything during the message" method.  

Sent from my iPad