Cant boot from USB

[Jamesl94]

Hello,

Recently been fixing some Laptops with new Hard drives and so on.

On my Acer Aspire 5750 I quickly installed a free trial version of Windows 7 Ultimate to see how it worked and check some things. But I'm not gonna pay the crazy money for a key to that. Just going to reinstall the Windows 7 home Premium again. So I downloaded an iso and put in on a flash drive that I used to install the Windows 7 I have running currently.

Heres where I think I messed up. I couldn't get it to boot from USB it would just boot normally, so I went into command prompt figuring I gotta do something in there, I'm not such a computer wizz really. So I cleaned the HDD and tried to Format it but that didn't work, just because I assumed I needed to get rid of Windows 7 Ultimate so I would have a clean install of Home premium .

But now when I turn on my Laptop it doesn't boot at all. It can't find anything to boot from, been into BIOS changed the order around to USB, made sure its in the 2.0 USB port, and I can't see anything odd in BIOS and I can't access anything else.

Any ideas? Have I majorly messed up here? Possible its the USB? The ISO file? Or me messing around in Command prompt.

I know its longwinded but I figured better chance of someone knowing if you got the full story.

Cheer.s

 

[JuRavy]

Hi, you should try booting from any other ISO file, just to check if it's an ISO boot sector problem, or a hardware problem. Try making a Gparted Live USB drive by downloading it here: http/gparted.org/download.php

I also have USB boot issues: depending on the ISO's boot sector (ie the "boot" folder at the root of the image), the USB drive is or isn't recognised by the BIOS. Gparted Live is one of those that work for me.

You could also try remaking the Windows 7 USB by mounting the image, copying its boot sector to your USB, and then copying the rest of the files to the USB. You have a tutorial to do that here:
http/www.fit-pc.com/wiki/index.php/How_to_make_Windows_7_bootable_install_USB_stick

PS: Having wiped out the hard drive shouldn't affect future installs.

 

[Paul NZ]

You cant boot from an ISO, you need something to extract the contents in it to a flash drive

Something like rufus

This will copy the contents to a flash drive, and make it bootable