Help with Dual Booting Driver Issues

Hello, all! New to this forum just signed up because I have a problem. SO. I have an HP laptop that came preinstalled with windows 10. I have made it so that I can also dual boot my system into windows 7. You know the drill, making a bootable usb and installing it to a different partition of my hard drive. It works perfectly fine except one thing. HALF OF THE DRIVERS ARE MISSING.

There isn't even a category for network adapters at all in device manager, so I can't access that to even connect to the internet. If I try and connect to the internet via control panel or whatever it just says there were no compatible methods of connecting or something vaguely along those lines. (Sorry I don't remember exactly what) And another strange thing is there is a group of devices in device manager called unknown with some called "ethernet controller", "network controller", something along the lines of a PCI adapter and 3 unknown devices. I tried going to the official hp support website from windows 10 and I downloaded the device drivers for my wifi adapter (realtek RTL8188EE 802.11 bgn wifi adapter) and tried to install them in windows 7 but it kept saying "device drivers were not successfully installed"

troubleshooters do nothing, and I'm thoroughly stumped. The same thing happened when I tried dual booting into windows 8.1 THE EXACT SAME PROBLEM. The devices work perfectly fine on windows 10, but simply don't exist in any other operating system I try to install (with the exception of ubuntu which I dual booted into perfectly fine before I removed it) I'm assuming that when I removed ubuntu I didn't do it completely and maybe that's why the devices are broken but I really have no idea. Any help is apreciated. Thank you.

(When I shift click restart and choose "boot from device" there is still an option for ubuntu, and grub2 is still in my bootloader however windows boot loader is just above it in priority if that helps at all)

CountMike said:

Let me understand correctly, things and driver don't work in Windows 7 but work in W10 ?

Yes exactly. I've tried fresh installs, and my iso files for the install were downloaded directly from microsoft so I don't think it would be corruption

I don't know if any Windows 10 drivers will work with Windows 7, but you can export all the third party drivers from Windows 10. Create a folder to hold the drivers. Like E:\Win10Drivers (drive letter and folder of your choice, just an example). Then open a Command Prompt (Admin) and run:

dism /online /export-driver /destination:E:\Win10Drivers

Then in your Windows 7 device manager you can right click on any hardware that has an exclamation point, or an unknown device and go to the options to manually upgrade drivers and point it to the E:\Win10Drivers folder (or whatever folder you created), make sure the box for subfolders is checked, and if one of the exported drivers is compatible it will load.

I seriously doubt, though, there will be any Windows 10 drivers compatible with Windows 7 - it usually will only work the other way, you might get a Windows 7 or 8 driver to work in Windows 10.

If the laptop is a newer model and was manufactured for Windows 10, the manufacturer isn't going to spend the money to make Windows 7 or 8 work on it.

CountMike said:

I don't know about that HP but I'm using same drivers for AMD chipset and GPU, Same Realtek drivers for sound and network as well as printers etc.

I'm guessing, though, that you went from Windows 7 to 10? The OP wants to go the opposite way, from Windows 10 to 7.

CountMike said:

I'm dual booting W7 and W10 on same computer. On different SSDs but still same thing.

And is it a newer laptop that the manufacture made after Windows 10 came out with Windows 10 loaded from the factory with no Windows 7 drivers available for from their website? At some point in time manufacturers simply stop supporting older operating systems and users who want to use older operating systems must either write their own drivers or hope they can stumble upon something compatible.