Running Win7 After Swapping HDD

USB drives - I know of no limitations on recently manufactured thumb drives. Meaning in the last several years. I remember what you are talking about, but that is history.

At the right shop, you can purchase a 3.5 to 2.5 IDE connection converter for about $5. You can connect that to the secondary IDE port on the laptop if you have one.

For about $15 you can get an IDE to USB converter.

Borrow someone's external IDE drive housing. Remove the drive and connect an IDE DVD drive to it.

CraigsList and eBay are a good place to look for used laptop drives under $20. On CraigsList, look for a craptop that someone is trashing - scavenge the drive.

Or, you could duct tape the DVD to the hard drive and use a Vulcan mind meld. Whatever is easiest.

Thanks for the info.

I'm headed to Wal-Mart right now to pick up a USB drive, and a self-help guide to Vulcan cultures or something.

Well, I'm a poor mother(SHUT YO MOUTH), so I didn't end up getting a flash drive from Wal-Mart, as they were 12 dollars. So, it looks like I'll end up vlite'ing the 7600 iso I have, and seeing what happens when I get it down to under 2GB, as thats the largest flash drive around here. I'll go ahead and describe the entire process here, in case anyone needs to do the same, even though I'm sure the bases have been covered by many already.

Custom Windows Installations - Windows 7

https://www.sevenforums.com/software/...-v3-0-sft.html

Windows 7 Lite Builds - SFT

Thanks for those links, they were good reads. Unfortunately I was well on my way to getting vLite to work. Currently its compiling the ISO. Updates commencing.

So, I wrote the image to the flash drive, using the UltraISO method, and when I go to boot from flash drive, it just hangs there, giving me a blinking cursor at the top left of my screen. I've seen it pop up some sort of message, but then it disappears really fast, and gives me the cursor.

I could write a book called, 'Climbing Windows 7 Mountain', and have it detail every roadblock and pitfall that I've fallen into while trying to get Win7 installed. It would be 9003 chapters, and end with my suicide, because I've wanted to kick the **** out of my computer for the past 3 days now, for not working the way I think it should.

wrong post

Orbital Shark said:

Have you tried to copy the contents of you Windows 7 DVD to a folder on your HDD?

This can often highlight read (therefore burn) issues which could contribute to what your experiencing.

Negative. I extracted the files straight from the ISO into vLite.