Hello,

I currently have windows 8.1 on my laptop and I would like to install windows 7 on an empty partition. I read something about installing a newer OS after older one may cause the system to become INOP. Could this be a problem If I install windows 7 now along with my current windows 8.1?

Thanks!

The question is what version of 8.1 do you have? If 8.1 Pro or above then you may want to enable Hyper-V for it and install Win7 there instead.

As for the installation order it's a rule of thumb to install older OS first then newer.

However in case of installing W7 after W8 it "should" work (anyway it's always a good practice to make a backup of your data, just in case), but then you will have older boot manager. So to change that you may want to load Win8 after the installation procedure and type as admin in CMD

bcdboot c:\windows

• Edited by Andrew.Fr 11 hours 38 minutes ago
• Marked as answer by BrendanY1990 11 hours 13 minutes ago

Thanks for the reply.

I have Windows 8.1, so Hyper-V wouldn't work for me. Just want to make sure, if the loader for win7 overwrites the win8, I'm assuming that would cause me to unable to boot into win8? Will I be able to fix it with fixboot or ECDBoot?

Thanks.

Some time ago I tested such dual configuration on Hyper-V, and loader has been overwritten, but I could still boot to Win8 and I was able to start and use both systems properly. So the difference was rather in visuals and not functionality (text mode - win7 vs. tiles - win8).

And above I posted the command you can use on Win8 to revert to Win8 loader.

• Edited by Andrew.Fr 11 hours 19 minutes ago
• Marked as answer by BrendanY1990 11 hours 13 minutes ago

Gotcha. Thanks for the info. I will give this a shot!.