Problem when installing Win8.1 on HP Pavilion

[Sjaak1948]

I have successfully installed Win10 Home and Win10 Pro on my HP Pavilion 595-p0355nd. However, when I want to install Win8.1 to run older applications I get a BSOD with "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart". This comes with an error message, but I can't read this message because the screen disappears quickly. My PC has 2x 8Gb RAM with both Win10 installations on an SSD. Any idea why I can't install Win8.1 on a 3rd partition?

[WAWood]

@Sjaak1948 

Sorry to ask an obvious question, but you said you already had two Win installs on as SSD. Are you trying to install Win8x to the same SSD? Or is this to a different "disk"?

[Sjaak1948]

I am trying to install Win8.1 in the 3rd partition on my M.2 NVMe SSD. All 3 partitions are 100Gb. For testing purposes I tried to install Win8.0 in that partition. I didn't get the error message, but the installation process only recognised my SATA harddrive. The SSD didn't show up in the screen where the process asks to install the OS. EaseUS PM shows the harddrive as disk 0 and the SSD as disk 1, but I don't think this should make any difference.

[WAWood]

@Sjaak1948 

When Windows install, and there is a disk 0 and disk 1, unless there is already a partition containing the Windows boot files, it will install them automatically to disk 0.  This can cause a problem if the PC is set to boot from disk 1 and has that disk set as Active.

However, since you already have two OSs installed and the PC is booting from them, the installation of a third will simply update the boot files used by those -- and should not be an issue.

How did you install to the SSDs if the PC does not recognize them?

[Sjaak1948]

I have disconnected the harddrive. Now the SSD shows as disk 0 and the Win8.0 installation shows the SSD in the list! However, when I select the 3rd partition the installation process stops because it can't find the standard NVM Express Controller driver. My SSD is a WD Black 1TB SN750 SSD NVMe which in my opinion is a common SSD and doesn't need a specific driver. It was a nice try to install Win8.x, but I think to stop with the installation. It takes too much time and the end is not yet there.

BTW: when connecting the harddrive again the SSD remains disk 0. But a Win8.1 installation doesn't work at all whatever I try.

[Sjaak1948]

I was able to successfully install Win8 with the following steps.

1. Install on older laptop

2. Clone installation from harddrive to flash USB drive

3. Clone installation from flash USB drive to SSD on my PC

To activate the new partition on my PC I used the command "diskpart". However, this gave the error "The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk. The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks". A new challenge to get the partition activated.