Window 7 Home Premium (retail) - won't boot from DVD (missing operating system)

Participant · 16 Feb 2010 at 19:41

Hi all

I was running an evaluation copy of Windows 7 that expires at the end of the month. Today my retail copy of W7 Home Premium arrived, so I backed everything up, restarted the PC, deleted the RAID 0 array, and inserted the DVD.

I've set the boot priority to look for the DVD first and ignore all other sources, yet it still gives me a message: 'Missing operating system', after which, nothing further happens until I ctrl-alt-del.

Can anyone give me some ideas as to how I can get around this or what the problem might be?

It's definitely an official retail copy of W7 (purchased from a major online retailer) and I've definitely set the boot sequence to look for the DVD drive first.

I've already deleted the RAID array so I can't go back into the OS to intall from there, and in any case I've tried booting from my old Vista and XP discs with no luck.

Thanks :confused:

.

P.S. I've tried pressing F12 to manually select the optical drive with no luck. The disc definitely works as I've put it in the laptop and I can read the disc and all the files.

SB118 · 16 Feb 2010 at 19:49

Try another known bootable disc, it could be a problem with the drive not being able to read the disc. Make a copy of the disc you've bought and try that?

Participant · 16 Feb 2010 at 19:54

SB118 said:
Try another known bootable disc, it could be a problem with the drive not being able to read the disc.

Robbie G said:
I've tried booting from my old Vista and XP discs with no luck.

I've tried two other discs that have been booted from on previous occasions on the same computer.

SB118 said:
Make a copy of the disc you've bought and try that?

Can't as only have one DVD burner and it's on the computer that won't boot.

Thanks anyway, appreciate the reply

.

SB118 · 16 Feb 2010 at 19:56

Gah, you edited as i was typing!

Daegan · 16 Feb 2010 at 20:17

Do you have a USB keyboard, if so is the USB Legacy Function (or equivalent) enabled in the BIOS?

Participant · 16 Feb 2010 at 20:20

SB118 said:
Gah, you edited as i was typing!

Ah, whoops, sorry!

I'm starting to think it might be a problem with the DVD drive as although it works fine in Windows, I just noticed that the BIOS doesn't list it when it starts up. Off I go to check the connections...

Participant · 16 Feb 2010 at 20:22

Daegan said:
Do you have a USB keyboard, if so is the USB Legacy Function (or equivalent) enabled in the BIOS?

Yes it's a USB keyboard but it doesn't even come up with the option to 'press any key to boot from DVD'. This is a BIOS / optical drive issue I think.

bledd · 16 Feb 2010 at 21:48

You say it had a raid array before.

Make sure all the sata settings are set to AHCI instead of RAID

Is this on the pc in your sig?

I have the P35-DS3R, I've got both my controllers set as AHCI, I only use the intel ones though

Participant · 16 Feb 2010 at 22:57

bledd. said:
You say it had a raid array before.

Make sure all the sata settings are set to AHCI instead of RAID

Is this on the pc in your sig?

I have the P35-DS3R, I've got both my controllers set as AHCI, I only use the intel ones though

Thanks very much for this as it at least pointed me in the right direction.

In the BIOS, the following was set to IDE instead of what it is in this picture:

Random?! And very annoying, I spent three hours trying to sort this out. Hate PCs sometimes!!

Once I changed this setting to what you can see in the pic, Windows 7 booted up fine and installed without issue.

Thanks again

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