Windows 7 Windows 7 Installation Won't Boot

ct09beckettp

New Member
Hello. Recently I downloaded the ISO for the new Windows 7 RC, but I don't have a dvd burner, so I took my Serial ATA drive and formatted it for NTFS, I attatched it to a working computer running windows xp, and from there I mounted the DVD ISO for windows 7, and installed it to the second, newly formatted drive. It went through the install sequence and installed alright, but when I removed it to install it to the computer I wanted it in, upon boot I get the message "ntldr is missing, press ctrl+alt+delete to reboot" and it won't start. I noticed though, on the machine running windows xp, even after the drive was removed, the boot manager still showed the windows 7 install and would try to boot to it, only to give an error. I managed to fix this using my windows xp cd and the recovery console, by using the fixboot and fixmbr command. I think the reason Windows 7 won't boot on my other machine has something to do with the boot sector and the mbr, but I don't have a dvd copy of Windows 7 to fix it from there. I decided to try to use my windows xp cd to try to do the same thing i did with the XP machine to fix the Windows 7 one, but when it asks for an administrator password, nothing i enter works (while installing windows 7 I never created a password.) Is there anyway I can make this windows 7 machine bootable? Maybe by copying ntldr to the drive?
 
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That's the problem. I don't have a DVD burner, so I can't burn the ISO to a dvd, and the biggest flash drive I own is 1 GB. Windows 7 is installed but I can't figure out how to get the Windows 7 bootloader and have it point to my windows 7 installation....
Is there any way I could "slim down" the dvd enough to where it only works as a windows 7 recovery CD? enough to where, I could use it to fix the bootloader?

I think I found a solution to this problem, so if anyone is in the same boat as me (I doubt it, but who knows, lol) and wants to install windows 7 but doesn't have a dvd burner or a big enough flash drive... here is what I'm doing.
My hard drive has two partitions, a large one that will be dedicated to windows 7, and a smaller one that has windows xp running.
I downloaded the DVD iso and I am mounting it in windows XP with daemon tools lite.
From there, you can install windows 7 from your windows xp installation (for 32 bit windows xp you can only install 32 bit windows 7)
Doing so will install the Windows 7 Bootloader and hopefully create a working windows 7 installation.
Once that is done, I plan to try to use EasyBCD on the windows 7 drive, to remove the windows xp entries from the MBR and then delete the drive, and extend the windows 7 partition to take the full drive.
And viola. Hopefully my problems will be solved.
I'll post later and tell ya how things go ;)
 
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