AMD RyZen & Windows 7 works

I managed to upgrade my existing 6 years Windows 7 installation to Ryzen. Hardware is ASUS Prime X370-Pro with a Ryzen 1800X. Just for a few tipps for people which do not like Windows 10 and want to live 2 more years with win7.

- Deinstall old AMD software beforehand. Windows kept on crashing during any normal startup. After a lot of safe mode boots it turned out to be the aoddriver service which belongs to the old AMD Overdrive. Looks like this software does not like Ryzen. I also removed the AMD DualCore optimizer.
- Having a PS/2 keyboard and mouse is also helpful as you will most like lose all USB controllers until you can install the drivers. Installing the drivers before the upgrade did not work. Having a PCIe USB controller with installed drivers may also be a working workaround
- Having a SATA DVD drives may also be handy: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technical.2500572/pa...
- Have copied all drivers that come with the new mainboard can be also helpful when you are able to boot into system.
- When using TrueCrypt, removing the full system encryption makes any repair attempt easier as you can access your data.
- Create an disk image of your OS disk, just in case you get stuck and want to revert to your old hardware.

- The latest bios version 0504 seems to be not very stable. Sometimes the system won't boot or will hang and sometime it takes several seconds to get to the splash screen. Sometimes everything is fine.
- The first day I spent getting anything to work. Linux would hang during startup, windows would hang very early, even the installation DVD could not boot. Even memtest86 just resetted the machine. Turned out that one of the two DDR4 modules was bad. This is my first DDR4 hardware so I had nothing to crosstest.
- I undid the truecrypt encryption in a second PC went I was stuck. This put me probably in some UEFI/Legacy problem rooted in the history of the system. Win7 was installed in UEFI mode, then converted to Legacy Boot for Truecrypt. Now with truecrypt removed I get one or two messages from the Win7 bootloader. Stop code 225. Fortunately it lets me continue.

Rubrik: 

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