How do I install Win 7 from a HD?

How do I install Win 7 from a HD?

I don't have access to a DVD drive or burner or thumbdrive. So, I need to install Win 7 from a Hard Drive (I have several installed). The catch is that I NEED this install to be a CLEAN install and not just a repair or what not. I already have the ISO and CD key and both are legal.

Any help would be nice.

I have an idea but I'm not sure exactly how to word my response yet. To gather my thoughts, I need to know the answers to the following questions.

To clarify you do currently have Windows 7 installed?
Since you stated it must be a clean install, I gather your data has been safely stored.

Who is the maker of your hard drive?
What size drive do you have?
How much space are you using?
Do you have the drive partitioned for more than one drive letter?

I'm not 100% sure it is possible?

For example, if you use a disk mounting program to mount the ISO, you can begin the first half of the installation onto the second hard drive. But after the system reboots, the mounted disk would be gone. I am not sure if you can boot back into the OS, remount the disk image, and continue the installation from where it left off?

hi
well; there are experts here who have in explained this in detail elsewhere and in different forums;

as a user, i normally install from HDD only and not from dvd; i use grub4dos;

if you are at "aware" level about multiple partitions and multi-disks, i can try to explain in simple words;

if you want to use an existing drive, you require about 40gb free space which can be partitioned into NTFS primary partition; (you can use Minitool home partition wizard for the same); copy the DVD contents or ISO extracted; what you need are two folders: BOOT and Sources; Copy the boot folder fully to the root of the partition that you created; you can copy the sources folder also fully but what you require is only two files in the folder (install.wim and boot.wim); then copy the bootmgr file to the root of the partition;

thus your new partition shall have bootmgr (file), BOOT (folder) and Sources (folder); now the next step is to start or boot the machine from this partition; this you can achieve in multiple ways:

1) if you know how to use grub4dos, then you can add a menuitem to chainloader bootmgr from that partition; it will start installing windows

2) if you dont know how to use grub (grldr) or grub4dos, the easy way is to use BOOTICE; download bootice and change the parition boot record (PBR) to vista/win7; you can use either bootice or any other partition table program to make this as an active parition; now on restarting the machine, this parition shall be loaded and windows shall start installing;

3) if you know any muliboot programs, i use SBM (smartboot manager) or PLOP; using that you can start the machine which will have an opening screen to select the partition you want to boot to; select your ntfs partition and the windows will start installing

the bottom line is the partition shall be active (or made active); should have bootmgr at the root and bcd in the BOOT folder and boot.wim and install.wim in the sources folder; then point to this partition for starting the machine;

hope you can make something out of the above

regards
neelakantan

The procedure isnot too complicated. For various reasons, it is a oft used procedure for me to install from an HD. I download direct from Microsoft, when an OS becomes available. I do not, at that stage, bother to burn to a DVD,
For the original poster. make a folder somewhere, on a partition separate from the partition to where you wish to do your clean install. Call it, if you wish "Setup"
Expand/Copy the entire contents of the DVD to the folder and run setup from there.

Excellent suggestion and quite possibly the simplest route!! Now for a little feedback to let us know what kind of drive space and partition count we are looking at.

Some PC's are packaged with the max amount of 4 primary partitions. That would make things a bit more difficult for us.

A few questions:

1) BIGGEST Question is: What file do I point the Boot Manager to? I point it to the correct drive letter but it also whats to be pointed to a file on that drive to load from slash boot to.

2) why do you need to put the BOOT folder and Sources folder and bootmgr file on a 40g partition? I don't plan on installing the new install onto this particular partition.

3) bootmgr file. I have 2 bootmgr files on the iso one has no extension the other is bootmgr.efi ... which one do I use?

4) instead of doing all the steps listed couldn't you just extract the entire ISO onto the root of the partition and then point the boot manager to that partition to boot from and follow the rest of your steps and it would still do a clean install?

It is MUCH easier to just use a DVD-RW disc, a rewritable one. That way you can erase it when you're done.

It's faster than messing with all that other stuff and procedures. I used ONE DVD-RW disc with all the various versions of Windows 7 in it's initial BETA versions to install prior to the RTM release.

Great post neelakantanr, thanks!

WhiteDragon, as for #2 it's so the partition can be booted to just as if it was the DVD media. If I understand it right, it has to be bootable so you can boot to it to begin the install, then after the system restart it can finish the installation.

#3 I am going to presume .efi is for UEFI enabled motherboards, so it would depend on your particular motherboard. It should work with just the normal bootmgr file though.

For what it's worth, I already use a 16GB flash drive as my personal toolkit for computer systems. It only took a few GB's to also make it into a bootable Windows 7 installer as that doesn't affect normal use of the flash drive. Since it's a flash drive it also drops a few minutes off the ~10 minute installation times from a DVD.

What I meant was why did it need to be a on 40g gig partition if i wasn't going to install windows onto that exact partition.

Thanks for the reply on mootmgr.

isn't making a thumbdrive into a bootable Windows 7 installer the same thing as setting it up to install off of a Hard Drive?

My real question is what file to I point the normal Windows 7 Boot Manager at so that it will start the install process when I restart. I already have it pointing at the correct partition/Hard-Drive but I don't know what file to point it at now.

Please see image here: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...otmanager.png/

Normally it points to "\Windows\system32\winload.exe" but that is only once windows is installed. I need to know what to put in it's place.