Installing Windows 7 on modern hardware (from USB 3.0 drive, NVMe, etc)

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Colonel Sanders

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So I'm thinking about throwing Windows 7 Pro on a spare drive I have, but last time I tried installing on a relatively modern PC, it was a huge pain in the butt trying to do it. Doing UEFI from a USB drive as well as dealing with AHCI, NVMe SSDs etc, seems like a massive headache.

Anyone have any tips on going about this without spending all day on it? Maybe there's some ISO out there that has most of the drivers slipstreamed in so it's painless? If not, what should I know going on?
 
EnderW said:
AHCI is natively supported in Windows 7 as far as I know
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I haven't had any issues with AHCI on modern 7 installs. USB 3.0 and NVME drivers for installation are a lot harder to deal with.
 
AltTabbins said:
I haven't had any issues with AHCI on modern 7 installs. USB 3.0 and NVME drivers for installation are a lot harder to deal with.
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Yeah, maybe AHCI wasn't one of the problems I ran into, I can't remember now. Any tips on USB/NVMe though? Thanks! edit: and I don't have an internal/sata DVD drive, so I'd be using either a flash drive or an external USB DVD.
 
As a starting point, I’d try the Asrock utility and then add the NVME driver file to the USB drive (I used the Intel one for my 900p). See if you can boot from USB and if the windows installer sees the destination drive.
 
Also you’ll have to use a registry hack to get any windows 7 updates on post skylake CPUs
 
Colonel Sanders said:
Yeah, maybe AHCI wasn't one of the problems I ran into, I can't remember now. Any tips on USB/NVMe though? Thanks! edit: and I don't have an internal/sata DVD drive, so I'd be using either a flash drive or an external USB DVD.
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There are programs that motherboard manufacturers release that will take a Windows 7 ISO on your computer and install usb 3.0 and NVME drivers.
 
AltTabbins said:
Heh. There’s simpler ways. There are some programs that re-enable updates.
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The ones I’ve seen just performed the registry hack for you. From what I remember it’s something like just changing one entry from 0 to 1.

What program did you use?
 
EnderW said:
The ones I’ve seen just performed the registry hack for you. From what I remember it’s something like just changing one entry from 0 to 1.

What program did you use?
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I used the zeffy patch off of github
 
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