Windows 7: Inspiron E1505 question(installation)

I bought a sata card for my Dell laptop. The bios says I can boot from the NIC. I bought a 1TB sata drive, and I was hoping to boot win 7 from that just like I would from a sata drive on my pc. I haven't had any luck so far. I can't get the driver for the car to load. . I have a lot of email files on this laptop. It has xp media edition on it. I'm running outlook express for my mail. I assume I won't be able to use outlook express anymore when I up grade to win 7. Now to upgrade to win 7 on the hard drive in the laptop I have to first upgrade to vista?

1. Boot from NIC is booting from a network connection (to load network backups on the computer's HD)
2. Upgrade from XP is not possible...you will have to do a clean install
3. Do you have an external SATA drive or an internal SATA drive inside an enclousre? Both will hook to USB and Windows 7 cannot install and boot from a USB

congaman

Hi and welcome to sevenforums

I have an inspiron 1405 and win 7 runs like a dream. Bios says you can boot from the NIC? nic is a network interface card for you network. You cant boot from that. As to booting fro the external sata drive that can be done. email: outlook express has been replaced by windows live mail and you can import the settings and mail directly. To upgrade: are you on xp now? and what version of win 7 do you have? both rev number (7600) and ultimate, pro, etc

Hope this helps

Ken

I have a sata drive in a sata and usb capable enclosure. connected to a sata card in the express slot on the laptop.
Is it ok to upgrade the win xp on the laptop to vista then to win 7?

Yeah you can xp>vista>win 7 but why would you want to. You could even dual boot if you wanted to keep xp, but if you do 2 upgrades you are importing the problems of both OS's and Microsoft strongly (as do I) recommends clean intsll

Ken

In theory it seems that it would work. i tried that and it did
work, kind of. wasted hours trying to get every thing working and finally did a full clean install. My recommendation is to use Easy Transfer and a clean install.

Ken

Ken

Glad its working. Clean install is one of our comandments

Ken