Disc Drive-less Win 7 Installation Problem

Is your Hard Drive set up in any kind of RAID configuration?

There is no RAID configuration set for my hard drive.

Do u have the boot device set for USB?

You didn't mention you had a hard drive in your specs?

Make sure the hard drive is detected in the bios, seems like setup isn't detecting a hard drive at all.

I have a Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB installed.

My BIOS does see the hard drive.

Another thing that happens is Windows 7 doesn't let me format the drive and says it's read only, or it's not plugged in properly.

I plugged it into the Mainboard's SATA3_0, and it has the power plugged into it as well.

Do I need to add a jumper to the pins on it? Or leave the pines alone?


And I also have my USB set as the boot device. It does start up the Win 7 installation, but it asks me for drivers for the disc drive, which I don't have.

If HDD access mode in BIOS is set to AHCI/RAID mode, you will need the driver that come s on the motherboard CD, just copy it to the root of the pen drive and W7 should pick it up or let you browse to it.

make sure your usb flash drive is in a usb 2.0 port and not the usb 3.0 port

What format did you use for the thumbdrive ? IIRC it must be FAT32 not NTFS

you can have it as ntfs for installing windows 7

thats what my 16gb is formatted to so i can still put files over 4gb on the unused space

Perhaps it has changed then -- or could be that only some newer MOBOs support using NTFS by having proper support for that format USB in their BIOS which might be part of the problem if his MOBO does not have proper support for it --- I know it used to be the case that you had to use FAT32 which is why all of the OEM manufacturers still format their recovery partitions in that format (ie. the hidden recovery partitions on almost all prebuilt system are formatted as FAT32 not NTFS !)

possibly OEM manufacturers still use fat32 as why fix it if its not broken--all their stuff is set that way and still works to restore windows when needed

i only found you could do it when i got a 16gb flash drive and still had all the extra space on it after making it bootable to install windows and wanted to transfer a file over 4gb to a friends pc--fat32 wont allow a single file over 4gb--so i looked at partitioning the flash drive with one fat32 and one ntfs partition only to find partitioning flash drives wont work

so i looked into formatting it all as ntfs and found you can still load windows 7 from it and have a software folder to put all the other stuff in to use the extra space--the software folder doesnt stop windows loading

have tried it on older hardware--5 or 6 year old probably ibm thinkpad t40 and it worked fine