I have a Haskell-era MSI B85-G41 PC Mate motherboard and I decided to use it as a “mid-tier”-ish gaming PC and also as a TV set top box. I already had a WinTV-DCR-2650 dual-tuner CableCARD USB device, and I was gifted a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 for the project. The board had 32 GB RAM when I decommissioned it in 2019 as the Adélie x86_64 builder, so memory was not a concern.
My goal is to use Windows 11 for gaming, and Windows 7 Media Centre for the TV support (since Cox Oklahoma uses encryption for virtually all channels).
The problem is that Microsoft dropped support for Windows 7 long before this hardware existed, so it is difficult to boot on it. Also, Windows 11 doesn’t officially support Haswell, either.
Windows 11 was trivial to install in all honesty. I used Rufus to put the installer for Windows 11 on a USB disk, then followed the suggestions from this article in Tom’s Hardware and it installed quite nicely. It is performant, stable, and even still does Windows Update.
Windows 7 was significantly more difficult. I used Rufus again and ensured it used GPT and UEFI. It locked up early in boot. I found the UEFISeven project which seemed to make things somewhat better, but it never finished booting beyond “Starting Windows”. The Windows logo continued to pulse, but after 15 minutes I gave up. I found an issue on the UEFISeven tracker and despite my trepidation on running unknown binaries for booting, putting it in the USB stick managed to boot Windows 7’s installation environment successfully.
Next, while performing the installation, the system had a STOP 0x7E in HIDCLASS.SYS. This appears to be a very classic bug and it’s caused by using a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard/Mouse. (Irony as a MS hardware product crashes MS Windows…) Replacing them with (even more ironically) an Apple Pro Keyboard and Mouse allowed setup to continue.
The next problem was actually dual-booting. If I use the patched Windows 7 boot EFI application as BOOTMGFW.EFI, Windows 11 doesn’t boot; it seems to load all the files, but stays at a black screen. If I use Windows 11’s BOOTMGFW.EFI, Windows 7 no longer boots.
I’ve made a small batch script on the desktop of each one to reboot to the other. The 7->11 script renames BOOTMGFW.EFI to BOOTMGFW.7, then renames BOOTMGFW.11 to BOOTMGFW.EFI. The inverse is done for the 11->7 script. Note that you have to mount the ESP first, which is done (in both OSes) as “MOUNTVOL S: /S”. You can use any available drive letter.
I used LegacyUpdate.net to fetch and install all the needed updates for Windows 7. I still wouldn’t trust it unprotected on the “real” internet, but I’m comfortable enough with it sitting on my home network this way. Kudos to that team for making such a useful and valuable service for all retrocomputing enthusiasts!
The Cat Fox Life 