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December 5th, 2018 00:00

XPS 15 9570, not able to Install Windows 7, NVMe PCI-E SSD

I have a Dell XPS 15 9570 (Intel 8300H+1TB HDD+8G version) laptop now adding additional new HP EX920 1TB NVME SSD (System and working drives) and replacing existing 1TB HDD with a new 512G Samsung 860 EVO SATA 3 SSD (as a backup drive).

I'm sure this new laptop supports NVME M.2 PCI-E Interface and working at full speed of 3.0x4, everything looks working well after installing Windows 10 into EX920 SSD's C: drive. As I hated Windows 10 so much (still using win 10 right now) due to some reasons, I wish I could install back Windows 7. 

I spent so many time looking for drivers for HP EX920 SSD, but I have replaced Intel 760P drivers in Windows 10 which is working fine, but in my below Windows 7 installation case is not useful.  

XPS 15's bios is now set to UEFI, SATA operation to ACHI, Enable Legacy Option ROMs and disable secure boot. I also formatted EX920 1TB with GUID Partition Table (GPT) partition, in order to be compatible with UEFI settings.

Windows 7 itself does not include standard NVME drivers but win 10 does, so I tried to pre-install Intel 760p SSD drivers (press F6 to install additional ssd drivers) before installing win 7 into driver C: ) but the blue screen shows "system is not fully ACPI compliant with stop code: 0x000000A5 " every time I tried to install Win 7 (Through a USB drive including Windows Installation Media ISO and Win 7 MSDN).

This is now making me frustrated and so confused.  Is it because of the BIOS's setting combination, or some hotfix need to be attached before installation, or the pre-installed SSD's drivers issue? 

 

Thanks for the help !

4 Operator

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14K Posts

December 5th, 2018 07:00

I'll answer your question but then explain why it won't matter.  First, you can't use Windows 10 NVMe drivers on Windows 7.  There are hotfixes to add NVMe support to Windows 7 that you can inject into both the Boot.wim and Install.wim files on your setup media, but that's a bit of a pain and injecting those hotfixes seems to break the install media when used on other systems.  The much easier solution would be to just switch your system from AHCI to RAID mode, since that activates the Intel Rapid Storage controller and abstracts the NVMe interface from the OS.  At that point, you'd just need to supply the Intel Rapid Storage driver (get the "F6 floppy" version from Intel directly) at the point where you choose which disk to install to.  Just click Load Driver and browse to the folder containing the extracted contents of the ZIP file you downloaded from Intel -- no need to inject anything or deal with hotfixes.  That's the configuration that Dell used for systems they shipped that had Windows 7 running on NVMe SSDs.  (NOTE: If you currently have a Windows 10 installation that was performed while the system was in AHCI mode, you'll need to change this setting back to AHCI to get that installation to boot again.)

Now, the reason none of the above matters in your case is because your system won't work with Windows 7 at all anyway.  Microsoft only supports Windows 7 on Intel Core CPUs up to 6th Gen, and you have 8th Gen.  Since Microsoft doesn't support Windows 7 on anything newer, Dell doesn't provide Windows 7 drivers for these systems, so even if Windows 7 worked properly (which isn't a guarantee at all), you'll probably find that other parts of your system don't work properly or at all.  And even if you somehow addressed all of that, Microsoft will stop providing security updates for Windows 7 at all in just over a year (January 2020), and if XP's retirement is any indication, browser vendors will stop providing updates on Windows 7 shortly thereafter, at which point that system will arguably become unsafe to use on the Internet -- and eventually lack of browser updates will probably create functional issues when browsing.  If you've ever tried to get a new XP SP3 install on the Internet recently, it's quite a challenge because it simply doesn't support multiple technologies that are now required on the modern Internet.

4 Operator

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14K Posts

December 5th, 2018 07:00

One more piece of advice if you decide to press on with Windows 7 anyway.  There are a few updates you should manually download beforehand to save yourself literally hours of time and MANY reboots on Windows Update.  I wrote a post about the recommended updates to download beforehand and install manually here if you're interested.

2 Posts

December 5th, 2018 14:00

Thank you jphughan.

Unfortunately, today i have tried all kinds of combinations of bios settings, AHCI or RAID, legacy ROM or UEFI, and press F6 to pre-install RAID drivers and any other possible NVME drivers, no luck ! The  blue screen keeps slapping my face ! 

Intel i5-8300H is 8Gen, the Coffeelake, which I am not assume it does not support Windows 7 anyway. I think i should give up. 

 

 
 

7 Technologist

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16K Posts

December 7th, 2018 11:00

You can install Windows 7 on a NVMe on up to 6th Generation Intel Hardware, I done this on an OptiPlex 7040. However your system is too new and Intel do not have driver support for their newer hardware on Windows 7. Even if you got the OS installed you would likely have a lousy user experience due to lack of system drivers.

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