New W7 install with replacement SSD

[hpr603]

I have a Dell E7440 which came with 128GB of SSD and runs W7 Enterprise. I want to do a new install of W7 Pro and upgrade the SSD size. I've got a W7 Pro product key and installed a new Samsung 850 EVO SSD with 250GB to replace the old SSD. I've downloaded the W7 Pro 64bit ISO file and made a bootable install USB using Rufus (this laptop doesn't have an optical drive). I've changed the BIOS to boot first from USB. However, I can't get the laptop to boot from the USB, I get the message 'No boot device found'. I've tried it with 2 different USB sticks (and 2 downloads of ISO file) and in all USB ports in my laptop. I've made bootable USBs before for other laptops and had no problem. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

 

[Hamperking68]

Try resetting your BIOS to it's default values then switching between UEFI and LEGACY

 

[hpr603]

I've tried this, and switching between Legacy and UEFI doesn't help with booting. With legacy I get Invalid 'System Disk' and 'No Boot devive Found'. With UEFI I get 'No bootable devices found' but also the option to run diagnostics (F5) and the diagnostics shows everything as fine, including the hard disk. (shows up correctly as Samsung SSD).

The UEFI setting has the option of Add Boot Option with 3 fields:
Boot Option Name (blank)
File Sytem List (prefilled beginning PciRoot(0x0)/Pci ...........
File Name (blank)
I've added USB Bootable Device for Boot Option and setup.exe (which is in the root of the USB drive) for file name but I'm still getting error message 'No Bootable devices found' There are other options for file name eg Bootsect.exe from the Boot folder. Should I be tring these?

 

[Hamperking68]

You may have an issue with the SSD or BIOS

 

[hpr603]

I've now solved the problem. The BIOS setting needed was Legacy but I think the core problem was in preparing the USB boot device. I should have run Rufus as administrator and I also should have run it on a 64bit machine as it was for installing 64bit Windows. When I made these changes the installation ran smoothly.