Systems Management

My school recently purchased an HP 9470m Ultrabook.  Most of the employees are currently running this same model, but they were purchased earlier and already had Windows 7 on them while this new one came pre-installed with Windows 8.  I am wanting to downgrade/install Windows 7 on this machine, but am having a devil of a time doing it due to this particular model of laptop coming standard with an SSD that handles some of the booting duties.  A predecessor of mine worked around this by formatting all of the hard drives on the machine and configuring legacy booting.  I was just curious if anyone had dealt with these exact model of laptops (HP 9470m Elitebooks) and might have a step-by-step guide to downgrading them/installing another operating system on them or maybe even have a sysprep answer file to prep the computer for re-imaging?