Installing Windows 7 on HP Ultrabook

naisdes

naisdes

naisdes

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Hi all, I recently bought a HP Ultrabook 14-b005sa and it comes with Windows 8 which I'm trying to replace with Windows 7. As this comes with no optical drive, I'm having to use the Windows 7 USB Download Tool to boot into the flash drive to install Windows 7. The problem I have at the moment is that it doesn't see any drives.

There is a SATA 750GB hard drive in there as well as a mSATA 32GB SSD in there. I think they might be RAID configured together and I think this could be why I'm not able to see the drives to format them?

Has anyone come across this before? Many thanks.
 
you probably need intel RST drivers. browse the HP support site searching that model number and look for them.

if they are in an .exe package, you can't run that so try and unzip the files from it using something like 7-zip. you basically want a folder on your USB stick containing a few .inf/.sys files and then you can use the "load driver" option during setup and select it.
 
Thanks. I'll give that a try tomorrow. I did see those drivers earlier but wasn't too sure about it being in .exe format at the time. Fingers crossed!
 
Tbh, I'd just use it for a week or so, once you get the links you want in the start menu and pin apps to the Taskbar, it's the same, but quicker.
 
I would just use Windows 8 if it was for me and I removed the bloatware, but this is a present for my mum on Sunday and she won't get used to Windows 8 as easily as me.

Or is there a way so that when booting into Windows, it goes to the Desktop right away?
 
Ok, so I've downloaded from HP the Intel RST drivers and unzipped them to my USB stick. I used the 'Intel Mobile Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller' drivers which got me to display my partitions fine. I was able to format the 600GB-odd partition for the OS, but it wouldn't let me install on it with an error about it being part of a GPT partition.

As I have created recovery discs already anyways, I decided to delete all the partitions and now I'm left with two, one is a 4GB unallocated space and the other with 698GB unallocated space. I can only click 'Next' with the latter but that now gives me the error 'Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition'.

If I use the AHCI drivers instead of RAID, it does the same thing.

Now I don't know what to try next. Is this all because my 750GB hard drive and mSATA 32GB SSD are binded together via RAID?
 
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try this. http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=209045

if no joy then you can press shift+f10 during setup and that will bring up a command prompt. you should be able to use diskpart to convert the drive back to standard MBR style partitions.

At a command prompt, type: diskpart, and then press ENTER.
At the diskpart prompt, type: list disk, and then press ENTER.
Record the disk number of the disk that you want to convert to an MBR disk.
At the diskpart prompt, type: select disk n, and then press ENTER.
At the diskpart prompt, type: convert mbr, and then press ENTER.
Click to expand...
 
Strange. I thought I would give it one last try and this time I was able to click on 'Next' with the 698GB partition after I created a new one and used all its space, with no error messages! Installing Windows 7 as I speak.

If this finishes, then I wonder what I do about the 32GB SSD so I can get Windows 7 to boot all nice and fast also? Although if it isn't possible with a standalone Windows 7 installation, it isn't a big deal as when I bought the laptop, I didn't even know it came with a SSD for caching, and my mum won't notice the difference.

Will definitely consider the guide you linked marc2003 if else all fails!
 
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It's all been resolved now. Went into BIOS and removed both hard drives from the RAID configuration, and then during the Windows 7 installation, I loaded the SATA drivers and was able to format and install Windows 7 on the 32GB SSD :)

Many thanks all for your help.
 
windows 7 on a 32GB drive? ouch.... :p

you won't have much room after running windows windows update. make sure you disable hibernation and change the size of the page file to 1 or 2GB.

to disable hibernation, open an elevated command prompt and run

Code: 
powercfg -h off

sorry if all this is common knowledge to you. i'd just thought i'd mention it. :)
 
And disable system restore.

I run W7 x64 on 2x machines, one is a netbook, it has about 2gb free (Has LibreOffice on there and a bunch of files too)
 
Is there a way to merge the 32GB SSD and 750GB HDD together, like how it was out of the box the way HP made it with Windows 8? I assume the 32GB SSD is just there for the speed so I doubt HP simply stuck Windows 8 on there because many users would run out of space very soon if they don't move things to the other hard drive?
 
you changed the way it was by tinkering with the raid settings. surely you must have known that? if you want to change back, you'll need to set that up again and re-install windows 7. and somehow get past the bit where you were stuck before. :p
 
I thought that it might have been possible to disable the RAID configuration first so I could actually format and install Windows 7, and then set it back afterwards? I thought maybe it was something that could be set Windows-side afterwards to use the SSD as cache, but if it's all done BIO-side first, then I guess I'm stuck :(

Edit: I think I got it done now :) Installed the Intel RST software afterwards and that allowed me to enable acceleration to use my 32GB SSD for caching.
 
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