Installing Windows 7 on early 2011 MBP from a USB

[hamstersaur]

Hello!
I've been working on this issue for quite some time and I am officially stumped. I'm currently running an early 2011 MBP dual-booting 10.6.8 and Windows 10. I would like to downgrade from Windows 10 to 7 but am running into some obstacles doing so. Namely, my optical drive is nonfunctional (spits out every disk I insert) and would need to be replaced. Naively I thought it would be a trivial thing to boot from a USB stick and be along my merry way.
Several weeks later I'm reading help pages for GRUB2 when I finally decided to simply ask for help.
Is this possible? If so, how? If not, why?
Thanks a ton!

 

[snaky69]

AFAIK there is some EFI trickery going on on Macs that don't come with optical drives to fool windows setup into thinking the USB key is internal.

Without that bit of magic, booting windows install from USB is not doable AFAIK.

Or at least, that was the case the last time I looked into it.