Harddrive+Boot help

[Khankar]

Hello. I'm new to these boards, but I believe this is the correct place to post my problem.

Well, here goes.

I've been searching the past to days for a solution to my problem without luck.

I recently reformated an old hard drive for a laptop computer and performed a killdisk on it afterwards. I want to freshly install Win7 on it. The hard drive I'm using originally came from another laptop than the one I want to use it in.

When I try to install Win7 on my newly formatted drive, I get the message, "no operating system found" - well I course, that's what I'm trying to install. I have already changed the prioritized bootorder to CD/DVD-drive, but I still get the "no operating system found"-error.

I have checked if there's someting wrong my CD, but I can succesfully boot it on a different computer. I even used two different win7-CDs without luck.

I have tried to partition the hard drive and then boot the CD and I have tried to leave hard drive unallocated and the boot, both with any succes.

I have checked BIOS and both the CD/DVD-drive and hard disk drive are found.

Can anyone help please?

 

[ngrego]

Any chance your cd drive is not working correctly?
It really doesn't make a difference if the HDD is partitioned or even formatted, the win7 installer has a disk tool on it so you can do all that during the install. Actually when installing you should delete all existing partitions and then install, windows will format and partition as needed.

Something you could try is to create a windows installation usb stick from the cd you own. Then try to install off the usb stick instead of the cd drive.

 

[Khankar]

I'm not sure. How can I test the CD-drive properly? All I know is that BIOS kan find it.

I knew that Windows would partition the drive by itself. It's like the CD is spinning a little and then it just stops.

Is it the same principle when making a bootable USB as with a CD?

 

[ngrego]

Try puttig the same cd in another pc and boot the pc. If it manages to boot off the cd and enter the windows 7 installation then the cd disk is ok. Otherwise you can try burning the cd on a blank cd at the slowest speed possible. If that doesn't work either the cd drive is likely bad.
Creating a bootable usb for windows installation takes about 30 min. but the windows installation is faster. After creating the usb installer enter bios with the usb stick connected to the PC. Go to the boot order section of the BIOS and move the usb to the top of the list, so the pc will boot from it first. Save the changes in the bios and exit. The pc should then start the installation as it would if it were a cd / dvd drive, only a bit faster.