How to revert to Windows 7 after installing Windows 8?

Question

I was a little gung-ho with my installation of W8 and installed it on my main PC. How do I revert to W7, keeping programs etc?

Answer 1

You can't uninstall the Windows Developer Preview. To reinstall your previous operating system, you must have restore or installation media.

See "Notes about Installing The Developer Preview"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516

You may have a "windows.old" folder on the C drive, this will contain all your files that were in the W7 installation, unless you formatted the partition prior to installing W8.

Answer 2

As @Moab said

You may have a windows.old file on the C drive, this will contain all your files that were in the Windows 7 installation, unless you formatted the partition prior to installing Windows 8 Developer Preview.

Using this article from Microsoft support you can recover data from windows.old file. The summary for the article says

This article describes how to manually restore a previous Windows installation on the computer to replace the current Windows Vista installation.

To do this, you must use the command prompt, and you must type specific commands at the command prompt to rename and to move folders between the different versions of Windows.

This article is intended for a beginning to intermediate computer user.

The article is intended for Windows Vista, but you can follow the steps and see if it still applies for reverting from Windows 8 Developer Preview to Windows 7.

Answer 3

This blog explains how to do it:

First of all the Windows 8 Developer Preview version doesn’t have any option of reverting it back to previous version of OS,you will therefore need some manual process that includes reformatting your hard drive and restoring disks. If you have a back up then it is more easy to revert to previous version. For it you have to first backup your data and perform a clean install of Windows 7 from the installation discs, or from the recovery disc partition created by your computer vendor.

If you want to try it I would suggest you that you should do it on a separate drive and make sure that the data cable is not connected with Windows 7 drive, or you can try it on a seperate dummy pc that is of no use for you, image backups might also work but it needs extra caution plus there are chances that it may fail.