Windows 7 Downgrade, Desperate Help Needed Please

Hello,

I'm ashamed to say that having been a lurker for some years and learning lots from people here, I'm now at the stage of needing some help myself that I cannot find the answer to. I hope someone can help me.

I have a Toshiba Satellite U940-10M which came with Windows 8. Now, I've decided that WIndows 8 isn't my cup of tea and have bought an OEM version of Win7 Pro 64 bit SP1 to allow me to install that.

The Toshiba doesn't have an inbuilt DVD drive, so have used my USB one and set the computer to boot from that. After much messing about, I discovered a BIOS setting that needed changing to allow legacy booting. ANyways, now I have the machine bootiong fine from the Win 7 installation disc.

My problem now starts. When I get to the page where you can choose to do a Custom install I select that. It then goes to the page where you expect to see your hard drive partitions listed. Sadly, there are none listed and the computer says:

No drives were found. Click load driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation.

Now this makes sense to me, I recall the good old days of SATA and XP when I had to create a floppy with SATA drivers on it and use that for the install so I'm assuming its something like that, but.....

As far as I can tell, the laptop has two HDDS inside. One is a Toshiba MQ01ABD075 and the other is a Samsung MZMPC032HBCD-00000. I have found that one of these is an mSATA and the other just seems to be a plain old SATA drive running at 5400RPM, so I really don't see the problem.

I cannot seem to find any kind of SATA mode in the BIOS settings where I might be able to select AHCI or anything like that.

I'm totally stumped and now have an unusable Laptop.The next problem is that I'm away tonight for work for a couple of months and really need this.

Please can anybody help me? I'd be so grateful if anyone can please spend some time and give me some help or pointers.

Thank you for looking at this and my fingers are tightly crossed.

Well, just in case this helps anyone else (or perhaps i was just too thick and this is really easy peasy stuff).

I opened up the machine and removed the mSATA and standard disc. I put in an old SATA hdd and it worked fine, I could install Win 7 to it. That told me it was somethign to do with the hard drive in the laptop.

I dug out the old SATA to USB kit I have and connected the hdd to my main pc via usb. I loaded disk management. i saw four partitions, three of which I couldn't mod..

I then opened up command prompt in Admin mode. Then did cd\ then diskpart.
I then enetered list disk. I found my disc in this list and selected it. I then ran the clean mode and closed down command prompt. I now went back to disk management, found my hdd and initialised it as MBR. I then put the drive back in the laptop and as we speak, win 7 seems to be installing just fine.

I haven't yet installed the mSATA drive, what use will it be?

Thank you to everyone who looked at this for me, I just hope my experience here might help someone else sometime.

Thank you again

Why didn't you just use the desktop in Win8 ?

Windows 8 just isn't for me. I expect others to say I should stick with it, but I like 7. I downloaded a windows button for it and tried it but it just wasn't the same thing.

I guess a wee bit of work and I have something I know and like. My personal opinion is I don't like Windows 8, many others will, but it's just not for me.

At least Win 7 should be supported for a while yet, before I have to put all my eggs with my iMac, or whatever there is when that time comes around

Ah, I see from the specs that the laptop is not touchscreen, so that explains why you don't like Win 8. Also, the mSATA is listed as

Solid State Drive capacity : 32 (for system cache use only and not user accessible) GB

I'm pretty sure the reason you could see no drives is that you didn't have the relevant mass storage drivers. If the caching solution is using Intel Rapid Storage Technology, you may see no drives on the install screen as the device would not have had drivers that existed when Windows 7 came out, therefore has no idea about how to load the storage controller during setup.

The (potential) solution to this would be to grab the relevant drivers and unpack them to a folder on the USB stick, then during the windows 7 setup, you can click 'load drivers' on the drive selection screen, and feed it the drivers required, then it should hopefully load those and let you see the drives. Which drivers exactly you'll need I'm not sure.

Looking at the Toshiba support page, only windows 8 is listed for that laptop but the drivers would probably work with windows 7. It looks like the only SATA drivers available are from intel, though theirs might be customised. You could try downloading them I guess. They are HERE and in theory might let you do the install 'properly' with the hardware as it shipped.

The procedure would be, put all the original hardware in, including the mSATA SSD, then boot from USB, at the drive selection, click 'load driver' and then give it the drivers you unpacked from that download above. Once that is done, refresh the available drives list, and then install onto the standard hard disk. Once windows is fully installed and working, you'd then install the next driver (from HERE), which includes Intel control panel, and use that to turn the SSD into a cache for the hard disk.

If you are using Windows 7 x64 then you do also have the option of installing using UEFI which should (marginally) speed up boot times. Here is a how-to on modifying the USB files for windows 7 slightly to allow it to boot from USB using UEFI. I've only tried it once but it did work, I had no caching to contend with, though .

The Intel caching is pretty effective at accelerating things, so I'd definitely try getting the install working and utilising it. Then again, if you do not wish to rock the boat having got this working well enough, you can just disregard this post .

-summat

to be fair batboy desktop mode on win8 is still quite different to win7.

There is broken parts of the gui (such as the open with window been half metro half desktop mode style just looks really odd), removed features, bugs, performance differences, compatability issues, the ugly flat win95 look and that a 3rd party app is needed to have the start menu back in place.

Some like yourself are ok with these issues others like myself and the OP are not.

Windows 7 isnt a dead product either it will have support for several years yet even if its only half hearted from microsoft.

I am not sure what happens when raid mode is enabled in the bios, but I wouldnt expect a laptop to use raid mode as laptops generally only have one hdd, which leaves ahci mode and ide mode. Windows 7 unlike XP should work with ahci out of the box. So to me this seems a bit of a weird one. Especially as he now says it works after he moved the drive out and back in?

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 07-Feb-13 16:21:41)

That's why I said grab the Toshiba-supplied drivers rather than the vanilla versions off Intel's website as there may be Toshiba-specific customisations.

They may be some vendor-specific modifications done (as there sometimes is with graphics drivers to allow switchable graphics for instance) which are causing the 'standard' AHCI drivers in windows 7 to draw a blank when the mSATA drive is installed alongside a HDD. It was only a thought, but the fact it all worked in windows 8 before he cleared it all off says it's a driver rather than a hardware issue, imo.

Also for IRST to function with a cache drive (assuming Toshiba is using Intel's caching solution) the controller *has* to be in RAID mode, most Dell laptops also ship with raid mode enabled now, for instance, its the most flexible as typically the same AHCI drivers will tend work for basic functionality, and if someone decides they want to add an mSATA drive for caching later, they don't have to reinstall windows, simply install the IRST driver set and enable caching.

Edited by summat (Fri 08-Feb-13 08:54:31)

ok so the question is does windows seven normally work without a driver disk with the intel bios in raid mode?

a quick google and also my gut guess is it wouldnt work without a driver disc, and I take your word raid mode been needed for that caching mode (as I have no idea).