Windows 7 not starting at all

MrZork said:

Attempting to reformat as Fat32 and just directly copy over the files that went into the ISO to the USB stick. Those files already have \efi\boot.

This failed. "The file 'install.wim' is too large for the destination file system." That file is 4.14 GB. Seems like a file that size may need NTFS.

As your 960 M.2 disk is GPT, you must create a Win 7 installation UEFI disk. It must be FAT32.
So my suggestion is to start over and add the MVMe drivers only to Boot.wim and to Install.wim (only to Win 7 HP). The size should be less than 4 G.

The USB stick I am using is 16 GB.

Megahertz07 said:

As your 960 M.2 disk is GPT, you must create a Win 7 installation UEFI disk. It must be FAT32.
So my suggestion is to start over and add the MVMe drivers only to Boot.wim and to Install.wim (only to Win 7 HP). The size should be less than 4 G.

I was already only putting a copy of the NVMe driver (the Samsung_NVM_Express_Driver_3.0.exe file) into the drivers/Bootx64 and drivers/Installx64 folders of the working folder for SIW2's tool.

So, if I am understanding correctly, from your earlier post, the change this time will be in the last step. In SIW2's post, step 5, I should choose whatever number corresponds to Win 7 HP (2, for me), instead of *.

Hi, Paul.


So, that makes it seem as though there isn't that much of a size difference between the all-versions approach and the just-Win-HP approach. If the latter doesn't bring the file install.wim below 2 GB (it was over 4 GB last time) then re-doing this process will not result in a system that can be put on a Fat32 drive.



I am not sure where to go from that point. Might I be doing something odd that is making that file huge? Is there a way to tell SIW2's tool to split that file up or something?

SIW2's tool just completed the just-Win7-HP run and sources/install.wim is once again over 4 GB (it is 4,453,697,747 bytes). Obviously, that is not going on a normal FAT 32 USB stick.


It seems like either there is some way to boot from an NTFS USB stick, or some way to create a much smaller source/install.wim file.

Just added the MVMe drivers to boot.wim (index 1 and 2) and to Install.wim (index 2 = HP)
The total size is 3.03G