The Asus boards are much harder in general to get to work on Windows 7. You can’t use the ported Windows 8 USB3 driver which works on many of the other brands (only the specially modified one for ASUS) , and if I am remembering correctly have to stick to certain older bios because the boot process freezes. This can be fixed by replacing the acpi.sys with the one modified by canonkong, but takes more work than say the MSI board that I’m using which only required the driver package. See the first page of this thread.
Thank you!
And what about asrock mb?
I’m pretty sure the ASRock motherboards are better, but it’s been over three years since I did my installation. Do a search in this thread for ASRock, and the previous posts will tell you which ASRock boards will work and which ones to avoid.
I mean for socket AM5, not AM4
Oh, OK. That makes it much easier. Only the MSI boards don’t require a lot of extra effort to install Windows 7. I’m looking to upgrade myself, and the ASRock, Asus, and Gigabyte, etc. boards all require the modified acpi file by canonkong to boot. In addition, most of the other brands no longer support CSM in their bios, and Windows 7 will freeze on the Windows Start UP screen in pure UEFI:
I was considering that as well when I saw it about a month ago, but I would strongly urge you to skim the thread I posted earlier. FlashBoot’s mentioned there several times but appears to only work properly with certain video cards. Some problems the posters encountered after Windows booted was the screen resolution stuck at low values and the installed video drivers not working properly.
First of all, big thanks to everybody who contributed to make all this possible. I was able to make this work:
- Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero x570 (BIOS 4402)
- AMD Ryzen 5950x
- Windows 7 SP1 x64 with Simplix patch: UpdatePack7R2-23.4.11
- AMD_Chips_Drivers_For_ASUS_Win7_8.1_SHA256_RE_D driver pack
- Original acpi.sys (Windows complained about the signature of the modded one after Simplix update) no A5 BSOD for now (Asus fixed their BIOS issue?)
The only thing I’m having issues with is the AMD RAID driver rcraid.sys, which I need for my HDD RAID0. Driver version is 8.1.0.26, which appears to be the last for Win7. After booting Windows everything works smoothly, but after resuming from sleep I get a BSOD 0x0000009f DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE. This seems to be a known issue with 8.1.x.x driver, e.g:
and resolved in version 8.2.0.24, which is unfortunately available only for Windows 10.
Is there any chance to mod the 8.2.0.24 driver for Windows 7? On many places I find it listed for Windows 7, but .inf says Windows 10 and I could not make it load. Or any other suggestion? I can provide debugging info or kernel minidumps if required, thanks.
This driver is supposed to be for Windows 7, but there is no way for me to check it.
rcraid.sys
9.2.0-00120
It’s from this page which has a number of rcraid.sys versions. Just type in rcraid.sys and select Windows 7 as the operating system.
@ryegrass: I think all these drivers newer than 8.1.0.26 are for Win10 exclusively. These generic driver distribution sites often get the OS info wrong. In every AMD distribution package I found, this driver resides in \WTx64 directory and the .inf indicates Win10. Using DPInst I installed 8.2.0.24 in my Driver Store, but Win7 won’t load it. Attempting the same with 9.2.0.120 results in “Not needed (no device for update present)”, even though AMD RAID device(s) are present on the machine and also listed in the .inf.
I don’t know whether Windows does some probing (test load, like modprobe in Linux) after you install drivers using DPInst. I suppose yes, and there should be an obvious reason why they were not installed on respective devices. I am a little reluctant to force load newer drivers (e.g. using DevCon), have never done that before. Don’t know what to try next.
About 3 years or so ago when I first moved my Windows 7 installation to my current Ryzen 3900X /MSI X570 Gaming Plus, I had a very similar problem testing USB 3 drivers. What I found worked best was to use Macrium Reflect (they have a free edition) to make an image of my existing Windows drive, that way no matter what happened when testing experimental drivers, I could always restore a working system. In device manager I would then force install the drivers by telling Windows I had a disk containing the updated driver and pointing Windows to the location of the inf file.
Yes, I also keep my system partition cloned, just in case if I break anything.
But Windows is stubborn and does things under the hood. Even if I try the “Have Disk” approach for the RAID driver, it still says “Windows has determined that the best driver is already installed”. There has to be some probing taking place, which fails.
You’ll have to force install the driver. See this link to see if the procedure is different from the one you’ve been using.
https://oemdrivers.com/tech-how-to-force-install-drivers-windows-7
I forced 8.2.0.24 (started with rcraid.sys on the first of two identical storage controller devices), but immediately got BSOD 0x000000D1 DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Strangely, after restart Windows booted. I tried also updating rcbottom and rccfg to the same version and that went without errors, but on the second rcraid.sys I got a BSOD again. After that, Windows 7 would not boot again.
I managed to fix it (restore the old driver) using a functional Windows 10, but it wasn’t fun.
I’m thinking of giving up on RAID altogether as I discovered one very repulsive fact regarding AMD RAID - hot swap is not supported. Not even with non-RAID volumes, any standalone SATA disk I connect (after the OS has booted) is not detected. Using “Refresh disks” in RAIDExpert2 has no effect. The same worked perfectly on my old Intel X99 board from 2015, or even older NVidia nForce stuff. Today is 2023, top of the line AM4 chipset, top of the line Asus mobo, and we’re back to stone age. Not to mention how crappy modern BIOSes are, options to selectively disable SATA ports have disappeared. Same with the M.2, even though every PCIe hardware configuration register clearly has a ‘link disabled’ bit. In 2023 most of our M.2 drives are on the bottom of a chasm between a brick-sized GPU and a monstrous CPU cooler, and they say “If you want to disable your M.2, remove it”. This says it all:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Intro is pure gold.
I’m glad you were able to get things up and running again. The reason I mentioned Macrium Reflect in the previous post is that it has an offline rescue disk (that you create). That way if the Windows 7 installation won’t boot or BSODs, it’s a simple matter of inserting the rescue USB and restoring the current working saved image (usually just a couple of minutes) instead of trying to fix the existing corrupted installation.
Everyone has their personal preferences, so I normally don’t say anything when someone decides that a raid array is best for their application, but with today’s NVMe PCIe 4.0 x 4 and now the PCIe 5 drives, a raid array seems to add a lot of complexity for little actual measurable improvement outside of specialized performance tests. Though I’m probable a bit prejudiced due to the (re)installation problems I’ve had in the past with two 10000 RPM spinning rust disks that were raided together for video editing. That unfortunately was the only way years ago to even keep up with a video stream.
I don’t know if it’s the difference between the Asus and MSI bios or the fact that I don’t have any RAID arrays, but I have an option to Hot Plug all of my SATA drives and my MSI X570 Gaming Plus uses the same X570 chipset as yours.
Good point about Macrium Reflect, will look into it, thanks for the hint.
I have two AMD boards: MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max and Asus X570 ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero, both offer the “Hot plug” options in BIOS but only if SATA controller is in the AHCI mode. And I really want to avoid rebooting just so that I could attach a backup or friend’s HDD.
I agree that HDD RAID0 is heading towards obsolesce, but it can still come in handy. Back in the day I really needed a fast scratch disk for intensive DSLR RAW photo processing (panorama stitching and astrophotography). Now I use 2x Samsung 980 PRO (first for the OS and the second as a scratch disk), but I find my old HDD RAID0 still useful for torrents and my local CD/CI sandbox (Nexus, Jenkins…). That requires considerable space, moderate bandwidth and lots of reading/writing, very well suited for HDD RAID. I see no reason to retire 100% healthy disks and grind my SSDs instead. I purchased the Asus X570 as it has 8 SATA ports, so if they still sell such features I expect we should be able to use them as we wish.
I also tried software RAID (Windows dynamic disk striping), but it does not play nice with dual booting (e.g. Win7 and Win10). Each time you switch the OS, disks are reported as ‘Foreign’ and you need to manually do ‘Import foreign disks’. Apparently each OS writes some kind of Host ID in the disk header database:
https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100016978
and I could not find any software to take control of that. And I don’t trust Windows with that manual import every time.
So they’re happy when we’re paying for new hardware, but not when we’re overly creative.
You’re probably right about the Hot Plug feature, I don’t have any drives in a raid array and all of my SATAs are set as AHCI so it never really crossed my mind that the option would disappear when selecting raid mode.
When I was dual booting Windows 10 and Windows 7, I found out that Fast Startup on Windows 10 needed to be disabled, as turning off the computer with Windows 10 doesn’t fully close the files on the disk, so that Windows 7 files were being corrupted at every boot. I never saw the foreign disk error, but it may be related.
https://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/385639-dual-boot-dirty-bit-problem.html
Does MPG-B650I-EDGE-WIFI have acpi error when installing windows 7？
Is there an acpi error when installing original windows 7 on MSI MPG X670E Carbon WiFi？
canonkong has said that the MSI boards are the only ones not to have the acpi error, or require a modified acpi.
EDIT: This comment is about the AM5 boards.