I am completely at the end of my tether with this system. I have a Samsung NP370R5E-A05UK laptop, 14 months into owning it, it was slowing down, so I thought I'd re-install the OS. It is a Windows 8 machine, but I wanted to install Windows 7 on it. First, I created a bootable USB with Win 7 installation files (I've used this on another PC a week ago so I know it works). It simply would NOT see the USB while booting no matter what I tried. The BIOS has NO option for Boot From USB/CD etc., only "Boot Option 1: Windows Boot manager" or whatever it's called. So I can't set the boot priority to anything else on since there's only 1 option - FastBoot is also Disabled. I went into Windows 8 settings and tried the "Recovery" options - "boot to UEFI BIOS" gets me to an old Blue-background legacy BIOS, not a UEFI one. There's no option to boot from USB either. Or CD. So I figured I had no choice but to restore Windows 8 from the Factory install partition. That worked fine, until I tried updating Windows 8. It got stuck on 0%. So I manually installed updates - they worked until I rebooted, and found the "Failure Configuring Windows updates - Reverting Changes" screen. That screen has been going for hours now and I can't get past it. I can't boot from external devices. I can't bloody well do anything with this POS. Does anyone have ANY idea what I should do from here???
Well Samsung provide drivers for Windows 7 so if you want to try and install it again, look for an option in the BIOS called "Secure Boot" and disable it. If you also have an option to change UEFI to Legacy or CSM then change that too. Doing that might also sort out your boot options too.
Oh. I am not sure if Samsung changed, but Samsung locks in the OS with the system, and does everything is can to not change the OS. I have read many people brick their system, and Samsung won't cover them, under the warranty. They had to pay for repair. I recall being a problem even for people upgrading to 8.1 from 8. However, in your case, I see something different from others that had the mentioned issue. You have other OS drivers, so maybe they did change, or your model isn't affected, where Samsung allows you to change the OS. In such case, do what lancer778544 mentioned. Make sure that secure boot is disabled. You may also need to disable UEFI, so that uses the old legacy BIOS. I know Windows 7 setup has a bug where if you use a USB flash drive method, it wont' work on a UEFI based system. You need to use via the disk. Windows 8 doesn't have this problem. And why do you want to downgrade Windows? your system will run slower, and take more time to boot. But regardless, it your decision.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. The reason for downgrading is A: it's my other half's laptop, and after a year of using Windows 8 she despises it despite my best efforts to streamline it, and B: every time I tried to update the system via Windows Update, it would fail and spend centuries "Reverting changes". At least I know what I'm getting with Windows 7; Windows 8 seems hell-bent on locking me out of every available troubleshooting tool there is. I would even settle for Windows 8 right now if I could get it to update without failing every single time, with or without my wife's blessings.
don't try and do more than 20 updates for the first few update cycles, you might get further, a local pc shop I do onsite visits and some repairs for has noticed the above behaviour.
