Installing Windows 7 on the 17R3

I ordered an Alienware 17 R3 laptop that came with a 128GB M.2 SATA 6Gb/s SSD (Boot) + 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage) hard drive and Windows 10 Home. I also ordered a new copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. I want to install Windows 7 onto my laptop before even setting up Windows 10, formatting whatever is currently on my computer in the process.

I used my desktop to burn the Windows 7 CD to a flash drive, and plugged it into my laptop after disabling secure boot control and enabling legacy boot options. Windows 7 setup started and let me choose a language but I have not been able to get past this error:
"A required CD/DVD device driver is missing"
Windows 7 setup allows me to browse for a driver but does not detect any inserted flash drives at all, despite having booted from one.

I tried removing the USB port and plugging it back in to the same or different USB ports during setup to no avail. I also tried every combination of formatting the flash drive as FAT, 32, manually copying the disc's contents to the flash drive, and using the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool. Nothing helped.

After more research I found out that the issue was that these were USB 3.0 ports. I couldn't find an option to disable USB 3.0 in the BIOS so I followed this tutorial to add the drivers to boot.wim and install.wim. Everything went fine just as the screenshots in the tutorial demonstrated and I replaced the flash drive's files with the newly updated and slightly larger boot.wim and install.wim. However, the same error message still persists when I try to to install Windows 7. Nothing has changed, except possibly a slightly faster load time.

After even more research I found that the issue may also lie with the SATA type being set to AHCI or RAID. Unfortunately those are the only 2 options I can set it to in the BIOS and I cannot find extensive information on this. So I have no idea what else to try. Could anyone help?

 

Update: I've been working on this continuously for almost 12 hours now and still no luck. I am able to boot from an Ubuntu flash drive which can then detect all other flash drives and allow me to transfer their files (drivers) to the hard drive, which I can then browse to during Windows 7 setup. However, none of the USB 3.0 or RAID drivers have allowed me to progress beyond the previously mentioned error.

All of the USB 3.0 drivers I've tried are marked as incompatible with my hardware and do nothing if I attempt to use them anyway, while both RAID drivers I've tried result in an error message stating that they could not be installed and to contact my vendor for updated drivers. In the case of the RAID drivers, they also seem to trigger a blue screen if I close the error message and try to install any more drivers before a reboot. I tried USB drivers from here and here, and RAID drivers from here and here. Nothing worked.

Does anyone know what else I could try? Is there a different BIOS version I can put on a USB drive to flash, which has a USB debug option? Any help would be greatly appreciated; I don't want to end up returning and finding a different laptop to buy.

 

Work in newest Aw15. Should also work in yours. https://eu.alienwarearena.com/forum...ows-7-with-new-alienware-15/last#post-1113722

 

I was using the wrong USB 3.0 drivers. These were the ones I needed.

 

AWESOME! So, did you succeed on the installation?

 

Yes. It took a little bit more effort to get it to install on my SSD properly but I probably would've been fine if I mounted the right drivers onto my USB's boot.wim and install.wim in the first place. I'm currently downloading the Killer Wifi drivers on my desktop which will hopefully allow me to download anything else I need from the laptop itself.

 

Cool! At least you were able to find them all