My experience with Windows 7 has been aggravating, and I didn’t even make it 2 steps into the installer.
My goal: Turn my desktop into a machine dual-booting Win7 64-bit and XP 32-bit.
Progress: FAIL
To be specific, this was using Windows 7 (64-bit) RTM off of the MSDNAA site. A 90-day trial of WIn7 (32-bit) did not have the following problem, presumably because I could launch the installer from XP (32-bit) instead of having to boot into the installer, this is unproven yet.
I put the disk into the DVD-rom drive, reset my desktop and boot into the 7 installer. The disk loads windows files needed from the installer and then you’re greeted with a background image. At this point you might as well leave for 10 minutes and actually accomplish something instead of staring at the installer’s background. By the way, after a weekend of trying to get the installer to work, I’ve concluded that Microsoft added that cool-blue background with a small green plant leaf and white hummingbird as an attempt at calming people and keeping them from burning 7 on the spot.
So you’ve waited the 10-15 minutes and are now at the language/region selection screen. You hit next and are greeted with the main install screen where you unknowingly hit the Install button and are greeted with yet another 10-15 minute wait as setup loads. So wait, if setup is loading just now…what was loading in that previous 10 minute pause?
Anyway, finally setup has loaded all the way, at which point you can say hello to the error message you’ll be looking at over the next few days. If you’re lucky, you’ll get right through this part without ever getting this message:
“A required CD/DVD device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD or USB flash drive, please insert it now. Note. If the windows installation media is in th which is oddly surprising that Microsoft can write an OS that has problems.e drive, you can safely remove it for this step.”
Now apparently there are a few fixes for this. Including booting and installing off a 4gig USB drive, installing and earlier beta build of WIn7 and then upgrading to RTM and other similarly rediculous ideas. On top of this, I’ve seen people that had this error with Vista64.
So at the end of the weekend, I can only guess that Microsoft has yet again slacked on the drivers for even the most basic devices.
-Here ends my (hopefully informative) rant
Fixes/Workarounds I’ve tried:
- Feed the installer any 64-bit mobo driver I could find (it only took the ATI raid driver as hardware compatible, I don’t use raid)
- Search for ATA ATAPI updates (only ones for XP which doesn’t help, couldn’t find a 64-bit update/driver)
- Give it cdrom.sys from Vista 64-bit (didn’t have cdrom.inf to go with it which I’m guessing is why it didn’t recognize the file)
- Give it a XP 32-bit install disk to pull drivers from (I was desperate)
I’ll be trying again next weekend with different approaches, stay tuned.
Update: http://csclub.uis.edu/?p=218
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Dan Tavenner
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