"Bootmgr is missing" before I can install W7

Interesting idea

but if it's different hardware will Windows 7 detect it or will it more than likely BSOD?

I don't think so. People have figured out how to stick XP on a flash drive. You could follow one of those tutorials.

Actually, now that I think about it, it wouldn't do that. Since whenever your upgrading a computer with, say, more RAM, you don't have to reinstall the OS.

Basically, take that computer's hard drive and hook it into a different computer. From there, install 7 on it, and stick it in the other computer. Should work!

Yes I've put XP on a flash drive but I've also had it BSOD if you try to move a hard disk to a computer with a totally different motherboard (or other hardware such as video cards and disk drives).

I'm curious if Windows 7 will do better.

To do it with XP we had to uninstall lots of hardware from the device manager before moving the hard disk to a new system. Either that or use repair install.

Have you reformatted the Hard Drive? Use that Gparted CD and delete the entire volume, then format it as NTFS.

If you format the hard drive, sure no problems. But I thought you were talking about installing Windows on one machine then moving that disk to another computer and trying to boot it.

Yes, that's what I was saying. I think that reformatting the whole thing would work, too.

Ok. I only install from the DVD and use that to format the disk.

(On 1 computer)

Hey Sup3rsport, I understand what you're saying about not booting from the hd. But, as you can see from my message above, it still won't cooperate. I did get a different screen when the drive was just free space, but the directions I received -- to reboot from the install disk and then do the repair -- those options were not available to me when I rebooted. Instead I got a message about the bootmgr being corrupt, or words to that effect.

I have never had this much problem installing an OS before. This machine has been stone-cold reliable for years, and it is just puzzling me no end why I should be having all this difficulty now. I've removed all the hard drives, save one. I've used a memory checker -- memtest86+ -- to double check that the system RAM was OK (it was). I set the mb's bios to its most stable configuration (a default selection in the bios), except I set numlock to "off." I have the boot order set to CDROM (or dvd), floppy 1, drive 0.

Hey, Ikilledkenny, my past experiences with the newer Windows operating systems is that they don't like to run on a different platform than the one they were installed on. I'm also concerned it might install a dual-boot on my other machine, which will be an annoyance once Win7 is no longer there. Yes, I reformatted the hard drive and I reformatted it as ntfs, using gparted even. Sup3rsprt is saying that this is the problem, that the drive shouldn't be formatted. I've tried it both ways and so far neither has made a difference.

I'll have to give imgburn a look. So far, though, I've been pretty happy with CDBurner XP.

Check out this guide.
Clean Install Windows 7

Let use know how far you get with it. Do you see the same images as the guide?