Got a brand new Dell XPS 15 (9550) Infinity edge, 3.5 Ghz, 16GB RAM, 32 GB SSD M2 Cache Raid with 1TB Sata HDD, Windows 10 Home OEM. Goal: Replace SSD+HDD with a Samsung Evo SSD 512GB, install and activate W7 and upgrade to W10 pro. Has the W10 home key in Bios. Checked SLIC and found 2.1. Lovely! Took off the SSD and the HDD and replaced them with the Evo. Tried to install W7 for 2 days. Doesn't recognize the SATA drivers,thus doesn't see the the SSD. Used all the tricks in the book, UEFI boot, legacy boot, several different drivers, edited drivers, driver injection, boot.wim replaced with windows 8 and windows 10... No luck. I was just about to give up and buy a bloody W10 pro license. Not before the last shot. Took the Evo out and stick it into another machine. It was a Dell Precision T7550, but any will do. Installed W7 Ultimate on the Evo and SLIC activated. Copied ON THE EVO, in root, all the W7 drivers from the Dell site's Laptop Precision 5510 (chipset, Wifi, Display, Audio). The XPS15 doesn't have W7 drivers, but 5510 has and is a very similar device. Especially the USB 3.0 is interesting, otherwise one can't see any device plugged into XPS' usb. Put the Evo back into XPS and boot into legacy mode. Hit F8 and go Safe mode. Crashes, blue screen. Boot again, the same F8 safe mode, same blue screen. Third time gives up and asks if I want recovery mode. Yes please! Does recovery and boots into login screen. Lovely! Checked activation: On. Nice. Installed drivers, updated windows. The rest is history. Cheers, us
i usualy do the first part of win 7 setup on other pc. then first reboot i shutdown and switch it back to the orig pc. i had this issue in a DV7-6163US with win 7 usb in left side. if used right side it installed fine. (usb HUB issues)
Make bootable USB of Win10 and delete install.wim in "\sources". The right procedure to install Win7 on latest PCs would be to have the file "install.wim" of Win7 setup copied to the installation files of Win10. I mean just delete "install.wim" of Win10 in "\sources" and copy "install.wim" file of Win7 here. In conclusion, setup files of Win10 and "install.wim" of Win7. So the setup will resemble Win10 but it will actually install Win7. The reason behind this is that Win10 setup has latest drivers for the recent hardware so it boots and detects all necessary hardware for installation. I hope this helps though it is tested by me.
This is incorrect, the installed windows itself doesn't benefit from this, only booting from a usb3 port will work. The drivers for windows itself should be inside the install.wim and as long it's a 7 version it won't have any of the promised 10 drivers in it.