I just received my daughter's new HP Envy (Christmas present for her). I did a complete backup of all the partitions (5) that it came with just in case she might want to go back to Win 8. When I went to install Win 7, I was told the the partition where Win 8 was installed (4) was not numbered in the proper order for installation. Did I want to proceed anyway? Do I? I would like to completely remove all the current partitions that are on the machine and just have Win 7 installed on a primary partition and most likely there will be a System Reserved partition also. I did not see any prompt on the Win 7 install disk for formatting the drive. Will that come later if I tell it to proceed?
Boot the Win 7 image and select "Custom \ Advanced" This should show all the partitions. Delete them all and make new ones, format the largest partition and install. Does she not like Windows 8.1 ? Should have left it on there and see if she would have gotten used to it. An idea would have been to do a test install on a separate HHD, making sure all was ok and the drivers worked well. Then if all was well install onto the original HDD. Or even to keep the original HDD nice and safe and use a new HDD for the windows 7 install. Or is that all a bit too much I rather like Windows 8.1 now after many goes with it.
Boot Win7 install media. As soon as you see the very first window (I think it asks you to either continue, or what Language you want), press Shift + F10. Then type: Code: diskpart list disk select disk # clean exit exit (# is likely 0; it'll be whatever number the HDD is you want to wipe) Then proceed with installation. Let Windows install to the unpartitioned disk (it'll handle partitions on it's own). Alternatively, if you know for a fact you don't need the recovery partition (not entirely sure what use it is, but I've gotten around just fine for years without it), and if you're using Legacy boot (not (U)EFI), you could have a single giant partition for the entire Windows install. During the diskpart phase above, right after you type clean, type create partition primary and then exit, exit. Then select the single partition when asked during the install process.
Either way i would still recommend 1 partittion for Windows and 1 partition for data. Having all in 1 will only fasten up Fragmentation and defragmenting it will last hours . And it spares the data rescue in case Windows fails to start.
Thanks to you all for posting. After messing around with Win 8 for awhile, I think I would like to leave it on the machine until my daughter at least tries it. I've Googled adding Win 7 to Win 8.1 but can't find anything that matches. Lot's for 8.1 to 7, but can I add 7 to 8.1 and dual boot it? I read that the old OS should always go in first, but I can't do that since this machine did not come with disks for 8.1. jetjock