Windows 8/7 in SSD/HDD

Question

I just need some help with somethings. I've just bought the Dell inspiron 14z, with 32Go SSD, and 500Go HDD. Windows 8 is installed on it and I don't like it so I've decided to install windows 7 on it, but here comes the problems.

First of all, when I go to computer, I can only see one drive called "OS(C:) 418GB free on 452GB" . I don't know the name of my ssd partition. And I don't know why my 500 are not displayed.

I've burnt my iso image on a dvd, in my bios i disabled the secure boot mode so that I can boot on the cd with windows 7. When I click to "install", I cannot see any drive in which I can install it. So I don't know neither who to install in properly on my SSD. Now when I reboot, I see two things : "Windows install (even if the cd is not in), and windows 8) I think I kind of damage a little ,y partition, so I would like either to use my Dell backup even if it means using Windowws 8 I'll try to use the retro ui add-ons. Or, to find a way to install all properly windows seven, well placed into my ssd as if I bought it brand new like that with the Windows 7 inside instead of the 8th

I don't know if I'm explaining clearly enough. If you have question please do not hesitate to ask. I thank you in advance for your answer =°

Answer 1

You don't see the SSD because it's being used exclusively by SRT (or whatever your machine's equivalent of that is). It's used as a cache and not made visible to the operating system.

For historical reasons, operating systems display disk sizes in GiB or MiB, but label it "GB" or "MB". 452GiB = 462,288 MiB = 473,956,352 KiB = 485,331,304,448 bytes. So about 15 of your 500 GB is missing. That's probably the size of the recovery partition.

To see the drive to install Windows 7, you need the appropriate "F6 floppy" (which you can burn to a CD or DVD) for your hard drive controller. If you have an Intel chipset, you can probably use this one.

There is one f6flpy*.zip file for 32-bit operating systems and one for 64-bit operating systems. Download the appropriate zip file for the version of Windows 7 you are installing, unzip it, and burn the contents to a CD or DVD. When you boot Windows 7, it will tell you to push F6 if you need to load an additional driver, do so. Then follow the directions to use the disk you burned to load the storage driver.

Answer 2

Actually, what I want to know is how should I do if I want to make partitions of a drive containing both SSD and HDD ? How to do it properly and correctly without spoiling my SSD. If for example I want to seperate around 230Go for the system, applications etc... (including my 32Go SSD so that my applications will run faster), and the rest for personal data like photos etc... Or even a virtual machine with ubuntu on it for example.