Installing Win7 from external drive

[iviv]

So, I've partitioned my external hard drive, partitioned it with FAT32, copied over the contents of my Win7 ISO, and made it the active partition.

But when I try to boot from it, I'm just getting a GRUB error 17.

Now, I'm guessing that MS are using grub as some way to load the stuff from the external hard drive to run the installer from, but I can't find any info on why I'm getting the error, googling (unsuprisingly) comes up with a ton of linux sites, which I'm not interested in.

There's only 1 unformatted hard drive plus the external connected. And I think my DVD drive is dead, which is why that isn't working, though I'm considering salvaging one from another PC here just to get it installed.

 

[eXor]

MS would never, ever use something like GRUB in any of their products!

What you are seeing is probably remnants of boot code from previous installs on that particular hard drive.

Try the following:

1. Format the external drive as NTFS.
2. Copy the boot and sources directory and the bootmgr file from the Win 7DVD to the root of the newly formatted disk.
3. Start a command prompt ( from an existing Vista / 7 install, or boot up with the DVD ) and issue the following commands - where x is the drive letter of the newly formmated disk.

x:
cd /boot
bootsect x:

4. Boot from the external drive - Windows setup should load

 

[iviv]

Ah, I did have linux installed on my external drive once... guess I didn't do as good a job of deleting it as I thought. Even so, I created a 10GB partition, quick formatted it to fat32, and it still came up with the grub error, I'd have thought that the fact it was a seperate partition would stop that happening.

Still, I managed to get an extremely slow install done via my mum's PC's dvd drive, thanks for the tip off regarding stuff still left on my external, I'll go wipe it properly now, make sure nothing like that happens again, and now I need to go buy a new DVD drive...