Disc Drive-less Win 7 Installation Problem

Cablephish

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Dec 29, 2011
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So the idea is that I've built a gaming rig, but I'm not sure I'll be able to game on it anytime soon as I'm unable to install Windows 7.

I decided I would install Windows 7 without a disc drive as I don't really use discs anymore, and would do a USB installation instead.

So far I managed to get Windows 7 installation to start, but I get an error asking me to install drivers for a disc drive, which I don't have.

I've been trying to install Windows for several hours and have had no luck getting past this point.

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My Computer's Specs:

Mainboard - Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3

CPU- Intel i5 2500 Socket 1155

RAM - Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB)

PSU - Corsair TX850M

GPU - PNY GTX 550 Ti

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If I'm missing anything else, please ask. I'd like to get this problem solved. And thanks in advance for any help.
 

Cablephish

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Dec 29, 2011
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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.
 


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