How do I install Win 7 from a HD?

I think what they were referring to was you would need at least a 40G drive that would then be partitioned for the OS and Install. That would be 35G plus for the OS and 5G for the Install. Of course I can tell you know this already from the post you have made.

Copying the contents of the ISO to a partition of its own and then marking that partition active should gain you access to the install process during boot. At least that is the way it used to work, I've not tried that procedure in a long time. There are aspect of Windows Boot Manager, I don't yet understand. I do know copying the contents to a flash drive after making the flash drive bootable works perfect.

"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? "

No, not the root! make another partition for the ISO contents.

"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."

As Cliff says, this would be for the installation. For the "setup" ,as suggested in my post, you only need about 5g/6gbs.

Give the partition, to which you intend to install, a name (Win7?) so that you can identify it for your custom install. The setup will find its own way, you don't have to "point" it to anything.

hi
@whitedragon and @devehc

sorry for the delayed reply as i was struggling with my own issue (see slipstreaming langcab) and so didnot post;

my idea of 40 gb was general in assumption that the win7 partiton shall be used for booting after installation and used with other programs such as office, antivirus, music and other software; Also intially ~4gb shall be taken by the installation files itself; though i dont have hold on official recommendation, i remember reading some where that ~8gb is min required for the windows (with tweaking for page file etc) though 12 gb is the general requirement; from my own experience i have used a 10 gb partition to install win7 (64bit) for cloning the partition; i found after tweaking ~6gb was used;

as others have mentioned elsewhere, installation files need not be in the same partition; from the first post (clean installation!) i assumed that one raw drive need be partitioned and used;

regarding the bootmgr file, please be assured that i would have mentioned bootmgr.efi if you need to use that; for standard computers and starting from hdd/cd you need only bootmgr and not bootmgr.efi

since i didnot know which bootmgr you are using i could not mention in details regarding the use; i assumed SBM (which looks at the bootsector) where you point to the partiton and not to the file; if you are using grub or other then you need to use (chainload) the file (bootmgr)

regards
neelakantan

? Was the post for me? I didn't refer to your previous post. Apologies but I didn't even read it thoroughly. I am sure the advice was valid, and could probably do the trick, but it did seem a little complicated.!