How to install win 7 to a pc w/o an optical drive?

This is an archive of the mabination.com forums which were active from 2010 to 2018. You can not register, post or otherwise interact with the site other than browsing the content for historical purposes. The content is provided as-is, from the moment of the last backup taken of the database in 2019. Image and video embeds are disabled on purpose and represented textually since most of those links are dead.

To view other archive projects go to https://archives.mabination.com

Meikeru wrote on 2011-12-03 00:01

I don't have a flash drive, but I do have an external hdd. But when I copy the iso/contents of the ISO it says "NTLDR is missing".

There any other ways to install win7 w/o an optical drive?
Zack wrote on 2011-12-03 00:12

Did you lose your CD? If you did, you could always find the files online and copy it to a CD.
Meikeru wrote on 2011-12-03 00:29

I don't have an optical drive. So that means I can't use any CD's to install.
Osayidan wrote on 2011-12-03 00:39

Random google find, just replace whatever is needed to be relevant to your situation.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/165159/install_windows_7_from_an_external_hard_drive.html
Meikeru wrote on 2011-12-03 00:53

Quote from Osayidan;679418:
Random google find, just replace whatever is needed to be relevant to your situation.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/165159/install_windows_7_from_an_external_hard_drive.html

Tried that. "NTLDR is missing" pops up when I try it.
Osayidan wrote on 2011-12-03 01:24

you need to make it bootable, bunch of ways to do it but with no optical media this video is probably your best bet, unless you have a floppy, which I doubt.
[video=youtube;Jclt_ylFWXs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jclt_ylFWXs[/video]
Yoorah wrote on 2011-12-03 06:09

The easiest way that I know works is to use a USB flash drive. Use a tool like Microsoft's own Win 7 USB/DVD tool to copy it to the disk: http://emea.microsoftstore.com/UK/en-GB/Service-Centre/Windows-7-USB-DVD-Download-Tool

If you don't have a flash drive, maybe it works for regular disk drives too?
Meikeru wrote on 2011-12-03 19:02

Quote from Osayidan;679484:
you need to make it bootable, bunch of ways to do it but with no optical media this video is probably your best bet, unless you have a floppy, which I doubt.
[video=youtube;Jclt_ylFWXs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jclt_ylFWXs[/video]

Thanks, this worked for me. Turns out that I didn't know that I had to remove all other files off the drive.