Running Win7 After Swapping HDD

Orbital Shark said:

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.

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.

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

Orbital Shark said:

Ah, my bad

What about Install Windows 7 FAST without a DVD or USB device

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:

Code:

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

Everything went successfully with that, and then I ran:

Code:

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.

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.