Windows 10 to Windows 7: a special case

a reply to: chr0naut

According to Disk Management the drive will not "initialize" so I can't format it to write to it as a check to see if it is working or not. (Am I being unintentionally funny here?)

The Win 7 install disk and the Win 10 USB thumb drive can see it. They know how big it is. They just can't do anything with it.

a reply to: ipsedixit

Either your drive is dead, the cable is bork or not connected 100%, or the chip on the motherboard responsible for HD communication between drive and CPU is fried. I'd guess it's the first or second possibility. Hope it helps. SATA cables can be less tactile than molex or IDE cables. I have experienced more than one loose SATA cable but it still looks OK. Remove and reseat the cables just to be sure.

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver

I just got back from "downtown". I returned the hard drive to the store where I bought it. They gave it a look and their computer couldn't see it. They said my story was consistent with a defective drive and they replaced the drive. I upgraded to a Seagate Barracuda 1tb and am going to try to install OSs again.

I want to look into a dual boot situation with Win 7 and Win 10 because I had issues in the past running my Epson scanner and my Epson printer (together) on Win 10. They worked like a charm in Win 7.

I'll let people know how things work out. Once again, thanks to all who responded.

originally posted by: ipsedixit
a reply to: LightSpeedDriver

I just got back from "downtown". I returned the hard drive to the store where I bought it. They gave it a look and their computer couldn't see it. They said my story was consistent with a defective drive and they replaced the drive. I upgraded to a Seagate Barracuda 1tb and am going to try to install OSs again.

I want to look into a dual boot situation with Win 7 and Win 10 because I had issues in the past running my Epson scanner and my Epson printer (together) on Win 10. They worked like a charm in Win 7.

I'll let people know how things work out. Once again, thanks to all who responded.

I'm pleased that they replaced the drive. Good customer support. Cheers!

I have installed Win 10 on the new drive and everything went very smoothly. I ran into trouble when it came to partitioning and installing Win 7 on the new partition because the drive was formatted with GPT partitions, which the installer couldn't work with. It requires an MBR style partition and to make that I would have to format the entire drive again, losing the Win 10 installation.

I don't want to start the whole process all over again so I am going to let the Win 7 installation go for the moment and possibly return to it using a slave drive. The other option that I'm considering is to do a "Windows to go" installation of Win 8.1 on a thumb drive.

a reply to: ipsedixit


Maybe your Epson will work on this HD, and all will be well.

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

I hope so. I haven't visited this issue in a while. My Epson equipment is not the latest and I believe there were accusations at one point that scanner drivers for Win 10 had not been updated, leading to issues. I could run the printer or the scanner but not both. All the details are a little vague. I ended up running Win 7 with Virtual Box inside Win 10 and had things working that way.

a reply to: ipsedixit

Keep windows 10 as the main o/s and use windows 7 in a vertual machine to run printers etc