Windows 8

Hello MajorGeeks, my father bought a laptop with windows 8 preinstalled. He doesn't like it, so he asked me to do a clean install of windows 7. The problem is that when I tried to do this, the format of the hard drive froze. So I restarted the laptop only to find this error, "No bootable medium, please insert medium (cd/dvd, usb, etc)" I figured I would try inserting a burnt dvd of windows 8 onto that laptop. No luck there (it seems the dvd drive doesnt recognize until you load windows 8 which I find weird). Is there anyway that I can boot the dvd or is there a way to make a bootable usb image from an iso that I downloaded?

 

Most new boards now are configured to use UEFI at boot and that prevents booting from anything other than the hard disk. You need to interrupt the boot process to get into the boot configuration and change it from UEFI to Legacy, or to both with Legacy first. You should then be able to boot from DVD.

 

My problem is that I don't know how to do that. If you or anyone could tell me then that would be great!

 

Is there nothing briefly on the screen immediately after power on about which keys to press? On my Lenovo it says press Enter to interrupt normal boot. Then you get several options.

Might also help if you told us what machine this is.

 

I do not see any as it goes directly to a blue screen where it says that windows 8 needs to be restored. Also the laptop is a Toshiba Satellite p855-s5102.

 

A quick google suggests it's F2 at boot. Let us know if it works.

 

The best way to get him to like it, and not have to go through the hassle of dealing with loading Win7 and hunting for the proper drivers, is to use something like Start8 from Stardock software.

You set it to directly to the desktop after logging in, and never deal with Metro, unless you change your user profile settings, and some very minor things, but mostly you are in desktop 99.99% of the time.

After a while, your father will never even notice that he is using 8, if you use the Start8 add-in.