Windows 7: Replacing Bad Laptop Drive - Install issues

My son's Dell Inspiron 1525 hard drive recently died. The system originally had Vista Home Premium on it. I want to load Win 7 on it but am trying to get Vista on the new drive and then upgrade to Win 7. I have a new Seagate drive and am struggling to get it installed. Very late in the installation of Vista to the brand new drive I get a message indicating

"Windows cannot install required files. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code 0x8007045D".

Not sure why this is happening. Maybe the new drive is bad? Possibly my Vista install disc is shot? Could the CD/DVD drive be bad?

Any help you can offer would be appreciated...

Tim

You are trying to install Windows 7 but you want to install Windows Vista first and then upgrade? What is the reasoning behind that? If none than go straight to installing Windows 7

OK..so your a mind reader cause I thought the same thing. After I posted initially I just tried to install Win 7 32-bit a few minutes ago and the error message I get before even getting to the install screen is "NTLDR is missing...Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

If I were there, I would:

Install the Windows 7 DVD. Success will rule out at least one of three things - faulty DVD drive, faulty Vista DVD, buggy Vista controller driver (in relation to the new HD).

Failing that, I would use the tools provided by the HD mfgr to perform a full format of the HD.

Then I would install Windows 7. Of course, I mean Vista.

The error code refers to an I/O error - a file is not being copied successfully.

Examine the Vista DVD carefully. Scratches or other blemishes?

Chris (Zidane24), I am retiring for the night. I was typing while you two were interacting.

tkenney65 - did you just copy the Windows 7 ISO to the DVD or did you use an ISO burning tool to create a bootable DVD?

The NTLDR error indicates that you have a single ISO file on the Windows 7 DVD. It is not bootable.

Antman he mentioned that NTLDR came up. Since the Vista installer ran and failed that would mean that the bootloader is a little messed up right now which is fine. The issue I see here is that the Windows 7 DVD wasn't even booted...it skipped over it and tried to boot an OS. Bad Windows 7 disc or drive?

I used imgBurn to burn the Win 7 DVD image to the DVD

Not if the laptop is set to, or instructed to, boot from the DVD. On a Dell, press F12 to select boot device.

If DVD is selected, and the error appears, it means the DVD is not bootable.

Could you try to burn a new disc at the slowest burn speed possible? Also this is the Release Candidate straight from Microsoft right? Is it the Release to Manufacturing from Technet/MSDN?

I can hang around a few more minutes.