Running Win7 After Swapping HDD

[Antman]

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.

 

[edsfunsite]

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.

 

[edsfunsite]

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.

 

[Antman]

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/17453-custom-windows-installations-windows-7-a.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/software/20291-zlite-rtp-v3-0-sft.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/19502-windows-7-lite-builds-sft.html

 

[edsfunsite]

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.

 

[edsfunsite]

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.

 

[Zidane24]

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/17453-custom-windows-installations-windows-7-a.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/software/20291-zlite-rtp-v3-0-sft.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/19502-windows-7-lite-builds-sft.html

I let ZLite go on the back burner as my research and research of others are increasing on ways to really making lite versions of 7 stable. As for my tutorial it will work for 7 with no issue...just be reminded that vLite is designed for Windows Vista SP1...Windows Vista SP2 and above are not compatible even though vLite will make a somewhat lite build with Windows 7

 

[rangerevo8]

wrong post

 

[Orbital Shark]

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.

 

[edsfunsite]

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.

 

[Orbital Shark]

But you're still booting from the DVD?

If so try copying all the files to a folder on your HDD. If that succeeds it rules out a bad burn

 

[edsfunsite]

But you're still booting from the DVD?

If so try copying all the files to a folder on your HDD. If that succeeds it rules out a bad burn

Nope. I'm trying to boot from USB.

 

[Orbital Shark]

Ah, my bad

What about http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/7943-install-windows-7-fast-without-dvd-usb-device.html

 

[edsfunsite]

Interesting. Its pretty cool that I get to see these things, as I would have never bothered if it had booted right from DVD.

Unfortunately the only computer with Vista or Win7 on it is a laptop currently. As I understand it you need to have one of those installed on another computer.

I'm going to install it on my buddies desktop here, then try this out, and see how well it'll work. Thanks again. All these options are awesome, and I appreciate everyone trying to help me out.

 

[zigzag3143]

It really does install easily and much more quickly from USB, and HD than from dvd. PPL have installed in 11 minutes

welcome aboard

Ken

 

[edsfunsite]

Ah, my bad

What about http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/7943-install-windows-7-fast-without-dvd-usb-device.html

One more nail in the coffin for my computer. I did as that tutorial said, with some modifications, as I was just making an entire 80gb hdd bootable. After figuring out how to make cmd.exe run as administrator, I ran:

imagex /apply G:\sources\install.wim 5 D:\

Everything went successfully with that, and then I ran:

D:\windows\system32\bcdboot D:\windows

That worked fine too.

In those examples, G:\ was my mounted Win7 image, and D:\ was the 80gb hdd that I want to run the install from.

When I swapped the hdd to my PC though, it gives me the same thing that happened with the flash drive. Its just a black screen, with a flashing white cursor in the top left of the screen. I made sure that I booted to the 80gb, which the computer seen during post and bios loading just fine.

So, I'm pretty much at my wits end with this. I guess the next step will be to disassemble my friends laptop and take the dvd drive out of it to see if that'll allow me to boot from dvd in my computer.

 

[edsfunsite]

Sorry to bump this topic, but I felt that an update here was needed.

Windows 7 has been successfully installed on my computer. The bios it has is an AMI bios, and had to be edited to open up all the hidden settings. After that was done, everything that you could disable, was. Vista would then boot, and install just fine. From inside Vista, the Win7 install was initiated, as the computer wouldn't boot from a win7 dvd. That installed too, and I'm currently typing all of this from Win7.

It looks like the culprit was USB2 support on this computer. I'm not sure why or how that would interfere with win7 booting, but it seems it has. That's the only thing now disabled in the bios after loading the defaults.

Again, sorry for the bump, but if someone else can get their computer to run Win7 with this info, then all the better.