Windows 7 disk won't boot computer

Hello,

I have my serial number that I got from Microsoft a while back and I burned the iso to a bootable dvd however when I try to boot with the burned disk, all that happens is I get a black screen with a flashing cursor at the top of the screen. I left the computer like this for aproximately 2 hours tonight and it never ended up booting up.

I've tried using imgburn as well as magiciso to burn the image to the disk and both of them have made coasters of several dvd disks now.

From what I remember when I first installed Win 7, I was atleast able to double click on the setup.exe program and it would bring up a windows 7 window in vista that was like an installer. However when I try that now, I just get a message telling me that autorun.dll is either not made for this version of windows or it is corrupt. I can't imagine the iso file becoming corrupt from simply sitting on a drive that I rarely use between the last time that I burned the iso image to a dvd and installed Win 7 and now.

Perhaps this is a common issue that somebody here knows how to deal with. Apparently MS isn't allowing any more downloads of the iso so I'm pretty much stuck with the iso that I have an hoping that it's not really corrupt.

Any help greatly appreciated.

You have to get the computer to boot from the CD-Rom. You might have to click on F12 for the boot options or access the bios by clicking on the "delete" key while your computer is starting and then change the boot order.

I'd say you have a corrupt copy of the ISO file, have you checked your copy against the md5 hash of the complete iso?

grab the tool in this thread.
Windows 7 ISO Verifier

Everyone who is running W7 should have a good copy of Win 7 media for legitimate repair purposes.

The rules of this site do not permit me to provide specific links but I think (hope ) I'm allowed to suggest generally that you could probably locate a copy of either the RC or the RTM if you are familiar with how to search for and download torrents. You just have to be sure to check the hash values and compare to MS official ones (listed in the FAQ on this site) to make sure whatever you have downloaded is, in fact, a true unmodified copy of the original media. Hashtab is another good free app for doing that.

Btw, you could install and run the RTM version unactivated for a total of 120 days by "rearming" every 30 days (allowed 3 30 day rearms after the first 30 days). I think there is a tutorial on this site on how to do that. After the 3 rearms are used up, you would have to enter a key and activate to continue using an RTM version.

Anyway, once you have obtained whatever media you have decided to go for, by whatever method (from a friend or from a torrent or buying it or whatever (btw, only $30 for Pro RTM if you have a valid .edu email address)) then just burn it using a good app like Imgburn (free) and burn at a slow speed and check the box to make the burning app verify the burn after it is finished to make sure your burn is a good one and not corrupted.

Good luck and I hope that you don't let this little "bump in the road" stop you from using W7.