Installing Windows 11 on HP Stream 7 tablet

Hello, HP Stream 7 has an Intel Atom 64-bit CPU, but its UEFI firmware is 32-bit only without CSM support. Installing Windows 8 and 10 32-bit in UEFI mode is fine, but any Windows 64-bit version USB doesn't even boot. I did a trick, I created a USB with Windows 10 32-bit v22H2 ISO in GPT UEFI mode with Rufus. I then replaced the file \sources\install.esd with the respective file from Windows 11 ISO. I booted with that hybrid Windows 10/11 32/64 USB and I managed to install Windows 11 on the tablet! My joy was ruined when I found out that the tablet cannot boot from the internal storage to load Windows 11 due to the 32-bit UEFI. I read in some other place that it might be possible to install Grub 32-bit and configure it to load Windows 64-bit. I tried to find details of how to do it but could not find any instructions. If anyone knows how to do it please reply! Point me to the appropriate link.

Thanks in advance.

It is inpossible to run 64bit on these older 32bit UEFI devices even though cpu supports 64bit.

People tried grub in the past on these sort of devices and nobody ever managed it.

I still have my old Lenovo tablet that uses an old Intel Atom 32bit CPU. I tried different 32bit Windows version and a couple of Linux versions. It just so under performs. At the time I bought it, I liked it for it being small and easy to take anywhere I went.

Winuser said:

I still have my old Lenovo tablet that uses an old Intel Atom 32bit CPU. I tried different 32bit Windows version and a couple of Linux versions. It just so under performs. At the time I bought it, I liked it for it being small and easy to take anywhere I went.

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The HP Stream 7 (I had one) was the special version with 64 bit Atom CPU but firmware was locked to a very unusual 32 bit uefi. The OP's issue is they want to run Windows 11 on their device but that is impossible.

I have posted to Grub2Win forum. If I don't find a solution I will eventually install Windows 10 v22H2 32-bit. Let's see...

spapakons said:

I have posted to Grub2Win forum. If I don't find a solution I will eventually install Windows 10 v22H2 32-bit. Let's see...

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I know there is no solution short of reflashing the firmware which is way beyond the ken of mere mortals. I have a Linx tablet similar to HP Stream 7 and it had an excellent forum (pretty defunct now) and there were loads of posts on this topic and nobody ever found a solution.

Most of following text shows precautions you need to make to upgrade/clean install on them, but as you have already tried installing w11, I hope you can recover ok but I am worried that it may be much trickier than you think.

However, one needs to be careful as these devices originally used Win8+Bing OS with special drivers and you may not be able to just clean install or you may lose touch screen, or rotation etc. Better to upgrade whatever you have than clean install. If device only has 32GB, you will struggle though.

Just exporting the drivers may not be enough. Some of these special drivers (touch screen, rotation etc.) do not always fully comply with driver standards and you find you need to make registry changes (easier said than done as these are rarely documented).

Another lesser known point is if device is still using Windows 8 + Bing OS, its embedded licence was incompatible with standard Windows 10 and a clean install would fail to activate. If you had the W8+Bing version, you could upgrade to standard Windows 10 as you got a digital licence.

Best to uninstall as much as you can until 10GB spare space on emmc drive. I would download iso onto a 32GB flash drive, attach that to the microsd port and run setup.exe from there.

However upgrades on these tablets can be tricky. A lot of these old tablets do not meet the nominal minimum spec for W10 but do still work.

I would make an image backup of the device using Macrium Reflect (the only image tool that worked with 32bit UEFI).

Also export all drivers.

If things went wrong and yiu have to Restore, it is a bit tricky as you have to boot from usb drive, and need 4 port usb hub (only 3 actually) with usb keyboard and usb mouse - bluetooth do not work in winpe mode). You need this to clean install as well.

Unfortunately, you have tried to install Win11 and I hope you can recover back to previous OS and do not run into driver issues. It really does takes careful planning to clean install on these 32bit uefi devices.

If you do run into driver issues, HP did at one time (iirc) have a customised iso but at a high price but I would be surprised if they still have it available.

I have all the drivers downloaded from HP. At first there is no touch or rotation but once I install the Intel platform (chipset) drivers everything is OK. I have installed Windows 10 before so I should have a digital license and Windows 11 should activate automatically. I also have a full backup with Acronis if I want to return to Windows 10 32-bit. However this is v1709 from 2017 and I don't know if it is better to just clean install Windows 10 v22H2 and reinstall my applications. I will wait until this Wednesday that I have a day off. If there is no solution by then I will install Windows 10 32-bit v22H2.

PS: Don't use Windows Update or Snappy or any other utilities to install the drivers! No matter what you do touch and rotation will never work unless you install the official Intel platform drivers directly from HP. Nothing else works. Been there done that.

As we expected, there is no solution to use 32-bit Grub in UEFI mode to load Windows 10 64-bit or 11. It can only be configured to load Linux 64-bit. If anyone knows different please post.

So I gave up and installed Windows 10 v22H2 32-bit. Of course at first there was no touch, no rotation, no sound until I installed the Intel platform drivers directly from HP.