Hi all. I had a IDE HDD issue, so got a new SATA HDD pimary drive and thought may as well stick windows 7 on. The new system setup is outlined below. OS: Windows XP Professional (SP3) CPU: Athlon Phenom 9850 Quad Core RAM: 4GB Non-ECC Crucial HDD: 1 - 1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA 1 (Main drive - NO OS. CANT INSTALL W7!) 2 - 750GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 2 (Storage drive) 3 - Pioneer DVD-215 Dual Layer SATA 3 4 - Pioneer DVD-212 Dual Layer SATA 4 VGA: Geforece 8500GT Sound: Creative Soundblaster Live 4 PSU: EZcool 1050W USB 2.0 Hub: Running 9 peripherals The problem I now have is that I have 2 SATA hard drives, all formatted and recognized by BIOS and windows. I put my new windows 7 DVD into the drive and selected boot from CD, but it doesnt seem to recognise it. I get "BOOT DISK FAILURE, PLEASE INSERT DISK". So clearly the setup process is not recognising the new drive as the primary boot up device and using the disk to load w7 onto it. Any suggestions? Does it have anything to do with RAID? Also what's the best way to get all my settings onto the new drive, once windows is on there? Should I use a hard disk imager and transfer like that? or is it better to manually install everything from scratch (which will be a pain in the ass!)...
make certain the boot sequence in the bios has the os drive as the 1st boot drive after win7 is installed.
..and make certain the boot sequence in the BIOS has the DVD drive containing the Win7 install disc as the 1st boot drive before win7 is installed. You have two DVD readers. Make sure your Win 7 disc is in the first DVD reader your BIOS tries to read and before your other DVD reader and any of the hard drives. Dick
for some reason your dvdrom isn't setup in the BIOS as the 1st boot. With sata it can be confusing. In the BIOS you can also set it up so that it will boot from whatever boot drive/cd it finds. The error your getting is that no boot drives/discs are being found by the bios. Your drives are showing up correctly since they have no operating systems, but your windows 7 disc is a live bootcd and should be recognized and start loading windows(unless it's damaged).
I will try to remove all unneeded drives, except the new HDD and DVD drives and reset the boot order. see if that works. will keep you updated. thanks
Ok I tried to leave just the new HDD in SATA 1 and the DVD drive in SATA 3, but no joy. Just says BOOK DISK FAILURE, PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE. There is a problem with the DVD I think. When I put the XP CD in, it boots fine! Does anyone have a bootable copy of windows that I can download and try before I take mine back to the store?
Just use a USB stick...I have never even tried to install windows 7 from a DVD (I got mine through technet...so I have no physical media from microsoft)...but I have never had any issues with booting from a USB stick, and you only need a 4GB unit.