It is clear that Microsoft is increasingly working on the market for operating systems promoting its latest development in the form of the tenth modification, forcing users of earlier versions of Windows to switch to its use almost forcibly. And all the same, the "seven", so beloved by many users, remains relevant and most in demand. There are also those who tried the "top ten" in the work, but they did not like it. In this regard, quite often there are questions about how to roll back Windows 10 to Windows 7. There are not so many options, I must say, but they are. We’ll talk about them later.
Can I roll back Windows 10 to 7: options
Indeed, you can return to using the seventh modification of Windows after installing the tenth. In this case, only the solutions presented in the list below can be applied:
- standard return after upgrading (the so-called downgrade);
- restore a healthy system from an image;
- Rollback to preinstalled Windows 7 on laptops
- clean installation of Windows 7 instead of the "tens".
In the above list, it is noteworthy that not all decisions on the implementation of the return are equivalent to each other. It is partially possible to roll back the system by saving your own files and previously installed programs (but not the ones that were already installed in Windows 10) using the first and second methods. The use of the third may not affect user data, however, you will have to say goodbye to applications that were installed before the transition to the tenth modification. The fourth method can be used exclusively when performing the so-called clean installation, when the previous methods did not give an effect, but there can be no question of saving files and programs. In the best case scenario, important files can simply be transferred to a logical partition or copied to a removable drive.
Standard rollback when upgrading
To begin with, let’s say that you followed Microsoft’s lead and still updated your “seven” to “ten”. How to roll back Windows 10 to Windows 7?
It’s very simple, because in the “top ten” there is a special tool for this, located in the security and update section. But here there are subtleties. Firstly, before thinking, users were given 30 days from the date of the upgrade, but now the period has been reduced to 10 days. After it expires, it will be impossible to return with all the desire.
Secondly, the presence of a special directory with the files of the old Windows.old system in the system partition is also an important condition. If you cleaned the disk with deleting system files, rollback will not be possible. Pay special attention to the fact that all previously installed applications in Windows 7 that migrated to Windows 10 will remain operational, but the programs that you installed in the "top ten" will disappear.
How to roll back Windows 10 to Windows 7 without losing data from the image?
The above option, as is already clear, is not good enough only because it cannot provide a full return after the time allotted for reflection, when the files of the old OS are deleted automatically.
That is why it is better to use a technique that allows you to return Windows 10 to Windows 7, in which it is supposed to use an image of a working system, and rollback through special boot options and a troubleshooting section.
Unfortunately, ordinary users very often do not think about such things, because the image needs to be created in advance. In addition, its size, depending on the size used for the system partition, disk space, can be very impressive. At least, if you are only thinking about moving to the “top ten”, create an image in advance and save it, say, in a logical section or on an external drive of suitable capacity (for example, to a USB-HDD).
Actions on laptops preloaded with Windows 7
Now let’s try to figure out how to roll back Windows 10 to Windows 7 on some laptop models that originally came pre-installed with the “seven” in the standard factory assembly. Here, the most important condition is the absence of actions with the hard drive (or rather, with the partition on which the factory copy of Windows 7 is stored).
To perform such operations in most laptops, you can find special menus that are called at startup, where you need to activate the reset item. Naturally, if the hard drive during Windows 10 installation was formatted with the removal of all existing partitions or replaced with a new one, you will not succeed.
Clean installation
Finally, with basic questions regarding how to roll back Windows 10 to Windows 7, clarity has been introduced. It remains to dwell briefly on the most recent option, involving a clean installation. It will be needed in cases where the previous solutions did not produce an effect, the necessary conditions for the preservation of the components of the old system were not met, or the possibility of performing a downgrade by the standard method simply expired.
In such a situation, you just need to create a new bootable drive, burn the installation distribution onto it from the image, and then perform the installation, in which it is mandatory to format the partition, which will be used later as the system partition for the installed “seven”.
Note: keep in mind that if you changed the architecture of 32 bits to 64-bit during installation (and, accordingly, converted the system partition from MBR to GPT), Windows 7 x86 just won’t get back in that way. Therefore, you will have to either perform the inverse conversion in advance (for example, in the AOMEI Partition Assistant application), or enable the Legacy boot mode in the BIOS instead of UEFI. The flash drive on which the image file is written must have the NTFS file system (FAT32 is required to install Windows 10 x64 when loading UEFI and using the GPT partition style).