Dell Inspiron 7559 trouble installing new OS

[LordInquisitor]

I'm new to the world of messing around with laptops.
I just bought this one and wanted Windows 10 taken off of it.
My plan was to install Windows 7 onto it, but alas, I'd forgotten that the laptop doesn't have a disk drive. I bought an external one but it can't seem to install the OS or boot from the external disk drive.
So, I plugged the laptop hard drive into my desktop and reformatted the whole thing with DISKPART and added a single partition with the whole volume. Plugged it back into the laptop, got the "Media test failed, check cable" error.
I've set the boot order to HDD first and even added an M.2 SSD for good measure, but nothing (and no combination of boot orders) seems to work.

To summarize: I'd really like to know how to install Windows 7 on this laptop's SSD, but can't figure out how since the laptop doesn't have an internal disk drive.

 

[penguintech]

External optical drive or bootable usb flash drive should work just fine. Make sure you are using the USB 2.0 ports and not the USB 3.0 port. you would also want to change the boot order to boot from USB first not the HDD.

 

[LordInquisitor]

The external optical drive I have isn't working, though it works on my desktop. I'm assuming the Windows disk must be messed up, so I'm downloading a Windows ISO to another disk to try that.
Also, there are no USB 2.0 ports on this laptop.

 

[penguintech]

hmm....
Next option would be Use Windows 7 USB 3.0 Creator Utility

unzip and run As Administrator, point to Windows 7 bootable usb and click create

https/downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25476/Windows-7-USB-3-0-Creator-Utility