Install Windows 7 FAST without a DVD or USB device

Kallb123 said:

I used the W7 dvd to go into command promt and did the bcd thing and it worked. it said
boot files created successfully
but i still can't boot into W7. it says
windows boot failure, insert system disk and press enter.

Later this evening i will try repairing the startup with the W7 disk.
I tried it before and what happens is that it starts to restart but it doesn't. it just stays at the shutting down screen. i can't move the mouse or anything so i think it crashes/freezes. it ALWAYS does this. whether its just before completeing install or doing this, the W7 installer always freezes before shut down. either that or it takes a long long time for W7 to shut down, which i guess isnt the case.

What can i do to get W7 bootable?

Click to expand...

The partition where the boot files are located is not marked active. Boot using the Windows 7 DVD and when the first screen comes up presss shift+f10 for a command prompt. Use dir /a to verify that bootmgr is in the root of the volume that you imaged Windows 7 into. If not you need to bcdboot again. Open diskpart, list vol, and then sel vol the volume where you imaged Windows 7. Use act to make sure it's activated.

shouldnt i be able to see bootmgr by looking in explorer from XP? ive checked and cant see it but i dont know if its a folder or file. can i also activate the partition in XP? i find it easier when i can have the internet behind it so i can see what to type.

Kallb123 said:

shouldnt i be able to see bootmgr by looking in explorer from XP? ive checked and cant see it but i dont know if its a folder or file. can i also activate the partition in XP? i find it easier when i can have the internet behind it so i can see what to type.

Click to expand...

That's the thing about GUI. Easy to use but hard to configure. You *might* be able to see bootmgr (it's a file) and no, I would not try to activate the partition in XP. Seems there are enough compatibility gotchas to make that an unwise choice. Re: seeing what to type -- do you have a printer?

i activated the volume in windows XP and when i tried to start W7 it said
NTLDR is missing.
press ctr+alt+del to restart.
i though that was used up to XP? or so it says on many websites.
lol just read above post what to do now?
format hard drive and start again?
should i reactivate the xp volume (its a different hard disk)?

Kallb123 said:

i activated the volume in windows XP and when i tried to start W7 it said
NTLDR is missing.
press ctr+alt+del to restart.
i though that was used up to XP? or so it says on many websites.
lol just read above post what to do now?
format hard drive and start again?
should i reactivate the xp volume (its a different hard disk)?

Click to expand...

We don't want to activate the XP partition as the boot files are now handled by Windows 7. Activate the Windows 7 partition -- the one with the hidden bootmgr file in the root. Then we can work on booting XP with that.

yes, i activated it through windows xp before you posted not to. lol.
it says NTLDR missing when trying to boot.
i think ill format and do it again. it doesnt really take long.

baarod said:

You can do the bcdboot command if you change directory to where the DLLs that it depends on exist. I just found this out and hadn't yet added it to the tutorial. XP has some of the same DLLs as 7 but they're the wrong version for bcdboot. What you do is CD to the dir (h:\windows\system32 in the example) then run bcdboot with that as the current directory. That will cause bcdboot to pick up the right DLLs and it will work OK.

Click to expand...

i've formatted and im installing again. can you explain this in more detail?

my XP is C drive - vol 5
windows 7 is E drive - vol 6
i have the image mounted on J

edit:
i started the the W7 dvd and opened cmd. after a few tries managed to get it to say boot files created successfully. so then i opened diskpart and selected the volume, then activated it. i turned the pc off by holding button for 5 secs (as ive said the restart/shutdown of the W7 installer always freezes) and when i started it back it went to windows xp still.
ive removed second monitor and 2GB ram (i now have 2GB not 4GB).
what is wrong??

I unplugged everything I could grasp. Including:
2GB of RAM (out of 4GB)
Hauppagge TV Tuner
Keyboard + Mouse (replaced with PS/2)
Second Monitor
Floppy Drive
Memory Card Reader
And disabled anything that I didn't need in the BIOS (USB and 2.0 support)

Installation worked perfectly.
The TV Tuner doesn't work (it caused BSOD in XP also) and many people say that it is very unstable. I guess that was a waste of money. If your install fails try removing any of the above.


Windows 7 seems as though it will take over from XP since for me it has been awesome. One downpoint is that Company Of Heroes won't install properly, I have to use XP to play the game.

Kallb123 said:

I unplugged everything I could grasp. Including:
2GB of RAM (out of 4GB)
Hauppagge TV Tuner
Keyboard + Mouse (replaced with PS/2)
Second Monitor
Floppy Drive
Memory Card Reader
And disabled anything that I didn't need in the BIOS (USB and 2.0 support)

Installation worked perfectly.
The TV Tuner doesn't work (it caused BSOD in XP also) and many people say that it is very unstable. I guess that was a waste of money. If your install fails try removing any of the above.


Windows 7 seems as though it will take over from XP since for me it has been awesome. One downpoint is that Company Of Heroes won't install properly, I have to use XP to play the game.

Click to expand...

Glad to hear things are going well. I find it odd that Company of Heroes will not install correctly for you as it seems to be used to compare XP-to-Vista-to-7 performance on almost every website I've looked at. You have tried compatibility mode right? Want to post a screen shot of the error you're getting?

I'm having trouble using this to install 7127, I get to the part where imagex is used, and it says that the specified image [5] was not found:
pastebin - collaborative debugging tool (really long)

Do I put 4, because it says this:
WIM Information:
----------------
Path: c:\windows7\sources\install.wim
GUID: {471a7030-949e-4ed9-98a4-534c221f0404}
Image Count: 4
Compression: LZX
Part Number: 1/1
Attributes: 0xc
Integrity info
Relative path junction

Copyright said:

I'm having trouble using this to install 7127, I get to the part where imagex is used, and it says that the specified image [5] was not found:
pastebin - collaborative debugging tool (really long)

Do I put 4, because it says this:
WIM Information:
----------------
Path: c:\windows7\sources\install.wim
GUID: {471a7030-949e-4ed9-98a4-534c221f0404}
Image Count: 4
Compression: LZX
Part Number: 1/1
Attributes: 0xc
Integrity info
Relative path junction

Click to expand...

Be incredibly careful with this. I just did an install of 7127 using this method YESTERDAY and I didn't have to modify my scripts at all. To my knowledge there are still five (5) images in a legit 7127 install.wim. Gimme a few minutes to check it out...

Five images confimed in 32-bit -- 4 in 64-bit. I sincerely hope you've got reason to be installing 64-bit. Please don't tell me you're installing on a 2GB laptop or something

baarod said:

I sincerely hope you've got reason to be installing 64-bit. Please don't tell me you're installing on a 2GB laptop or something

Click to expand...

Nope Quad-Core desktop dual-booting Vista x64 and 7 x86(for testing), I've decided I want to test x64 now .

Thanks for the help.

I used this method to prep. a hard drive for a fresh install if 7127 x64 on my laptop. After applying the image to a cleaned HDD set to "active," it would not boot ("bootmgr is missing"). I did all the work with the HDD on an eSATA HDD dock from my desktop. After it didn't boot I did the "active" command again, just in case. But it still didn't boot.

The command: <my drive>:\windows\system32\bcdboot <my drive>:\windows
reported success but I didn't see where it added any boot files, hidden or otherwise, anywhere.

So I booted from my USB install flash key and ran startup repair. It found a problem, repaired, went to reboot but still missing bootmgr.

Repeated the startup repair again, found and fixed problems again, rebooted and it worked.

Any idea why the bcdboot command didn't create the necessary boot files?

One other comment. This technique doesn't create the hidden 100MB repair/recovery partition. It might be possible, I'm thinking, to create one, copy over the boot.sdi and winre.wim files to it, and configure with the setautofailover.cmd command.

Any thoughts?

zrtom said:

I used this method to prep. a hard drive for a fresh install if 7127 x64 on my laptop. After applying the image to a cleaned HDD set to "active," it would not boot ("bootmgr is missing"). I did all the work with the HDD on an eSATA HDD dock from my desktop. After it didn't boot I did the "active" command again, just in case. But it still didn't boot.

The command: <my drive>:\windows\system32\bcdboot <my drive>:\windows
reported success but I didn't see where it added any boot files, hidden or otherwise, anywhere.

So I booted from my USB install flash key and ran startup repair. It found a problem, repaired, went to reboot but still missing bootmgr.

Repeated the startup repair again, found and fixed problems again, rebooted and it worked.

Any idea why the bcdboot command didn't create the necessary boot files?

One other comment. This technique doesn't create the hidden 100MB repair/recovery partition. It might be possible, I'm thinking, to create one, copy over the boot.sdi and winre.wim files to it, and configure with the setautofailover.cmd command.

Any thoughts?

Click to expand...

The eSATA dock is not the primary boot device in the BIOS. As I explained in the tutorial, things get a little more messy when secondary hard disks are taken into account. bcdboot asks your BIOS for the primary boot device and then transfers the system to it. Even wonder why there's a "from" parameter and no "to" parameter to the bcboot command line? Well there is but it doesn't always work so I didn't include it as I couldn't figure out how to explain it without clouding the simplicity of the tutorial.

You can include a /s <drive> parameter to tell bcdboot where to put the files thus overriding the location it reads from the computer's firmware (BIOS). While that seems straightforward enough, it's really not considering I then have to somehow explain how to make dozens of different BIOS variations on an even greater number of mainboards boot from an arbitrary device. That becomes more of a chapter than a tutorial -- which I am considering provided I get the advance from the publisher

If you know how to work your BIOS then the /s parameter stands a decent chance of working. It stands a better chance for actual hard drives and most SSDs than USB Flash Drives and Cards but I've managed to make them work too. Even devices that Windows 7 would completely REFUSE to install to because the BIOS has them flagged as removeable can be used in this way since once their booted from Windows ignores the removeable flag.

That 100MB partition is a "nice to have" not a requirement. It simplifies a variety of things since the boot partition is not also the system partition. Disk utilities and virus scanners could run more cleanly in this pre-execution environment because the "Windows drive" could be completely dismounted cleanly if needed. It also centralizes the location for dual boots and beyond. Clearly it's a good idea as OS designers have been doing it on mainframes and minis forever and it's a defacto standard on the various UNIX flavors but it's just not required on Windows, not even Windows 7. I think Microsoft would like to move people in that direction but I don't have a solution for creating it using the WAIK toolset.

D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>imagex /apply f:\sources\install.wim 4 g:\

ImageX Tool for Windows
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.


[ 100% ] Applying progress

Successfully applied image.

Total elapsed time: 7 min 0 sec





D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>g:\windows\system32\bcdboot h:\windows
This version of g:\windows\system32\bcdboot.exe is not compatible with the versi
on of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see wh
ether you need a x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then c
ontact the software publisher.



??? i'M trying to install Windows 7 x64 i currently doing this on Windows 7 32 bit.. i thought this would work.....

SEEN HERE
http://www.sevenforums.com/installa...ng-windows-7-64-bit-32-bit-xp.html#post106469

HELP?

expo703 said:

D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>imagex /apply f:\sources\install.wim 4 g:\

ImageX Tool for Windows
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.


[ 100% ] Applying progress

Successfully applied image.

Total elapsed time: 7 min 0 sec





D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>g:\windows\system32\bcdboot h:\windows
This version of g:\windows\system32\bcdboot.exe is not compatible with the versi
on of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see wh
ether you need a x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then c
ontact the software publisher.



??? i'M trying to install Windows 7 x64 i currently doing this on Windows 7 32 bit.. i thought this would work.....

SEEN HERE
http://www.sevenforums.com/installa...ng-windows-7-64-bit-32-bit-xp.html#post106469

HELP?

Click to expand...

Yeah, that'll never work. You've got a 64-bit bcdboot.exe trying to execute on 32-bit Windows. Try using this 32-bit one: View attachment bcdboot.zip

so what do i write in the cmd line? if i put the bcdboot.exe to my desktop?

D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>bcdboot g:\windows


g= the 7new partion 16gig.

Once i reboot will i have my dual boot option? or a 3rd option saying 7new and then it will start to install windows 7 64 bit? i'm confused on this..

I have C: drive that has windows XP 32 bit and all my backup and D: right now has windows 7 32bit.
I dont have a DVD to burn so i thought i'd give this tutorial a try. But idealy i wanted my D drive to be Windows 7 64 bit. but since i made a new parition its now G: which as 16 gig and the following folders perflogs,programfiles,programfiles (x86) program data users and windows..

If i do get 64 bit fully installed on the G: can i merge or delete the big partiion D: that has 60 gigs remaining on it?

expo703 said:

so what do i write in the cmd line? if i put the bcdboot.exe to my desktop?

D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>bcdboot g:\windows


g= the 7new partion 16gig.

Click to expand...

If BIOS is configured to boot g: then yes. Otherwise add "/s g:" to the end of the command line. Read up in the thread for more information.

baarod said:

If BIOS is configured to boot g: then yes. Otherwise add "/s g:" to the end of the command line. Read up in the thread for more information.

Click to expand...

ok i will add that but... when i boot up in the bois i get a splash screen saying "Previous version of windows" Which is my C:Windows XP
or "Windows 7" Which is my D: drive right now 64 gigs Windows 7 32 bit.


so the line would be>>>>>>>>>> D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>bcdboot g:\windows /s g:

expo703 said:

Once i reboot will i have my dual boot option? or a 3rd option saying 7new and then it will start to install windows 7 64 bit? i'm confused on this..

I have C: drive that has windows XP 32 bit and all my backup and D: right now has windows 7 32bit.
I dont have a DVD to burn so i thought i'd give this tutorial a try. But idealy i wanted my D drive to be Windows 7 64 bit. but since i made a new parition its now G: which as 16 gig and the following folders perflogs,programfiles,programfiles (x86) program data users and windows..

If i do get 64 bit fully installed on the G: can i merge or delete the big partition D: that has 60 gigs remaining on it?

Click to expand...

I dont know if u saw that...

D:\Users\JPE\Desktop>bcdboot g:\windows /s g:


Boot files successfully created.

Okay.. i rebooted... and still only have two options - Previous vs of windows which is XP on my c: and Windows 7 which is on my D:\... how do i install 64 bit than??????