SDNET – all about .NET and computing

The past two days I tried to make a file server out of an older pc I had lying around. It had an MSI KT6V-LSR with an Athlon processor on it. Toghether with one 400Gb and one 500Gb harddrive I thought I could crop a machine for storing files. My primary OS of choice was Windows 7. I had also an XP around but I consider it too outdated to use and the Vista would be too slughish on this old hardware.

The problem I encountered was that Win7 was not booting on this pc. This is because on the Win7, Microsoft changed the boot sector (don’t ask me why) and older systems do not recognize this as a valid bootable disk and the only message I was getting was a “cannot boot from cd code 5” error. After scouring the net I finally found a sollution which I want to post here.

1. Get a Windows Vista boot disk. It does not matter it’s from a “friend” or yours. You won’t actually intall Vista, just piggy-back on it’s boot capabilities.

2. Boot from the Vista disk.

3. After selecting the language select repair. Afterwards, depending on the state of your harddrive and other stuff you should be getting the choice of running a command prompt. Do it.

4. Change the disks such that your drive now contains the Windows7 disk.

5. In the command prompt navigate to the drive with the Windows7 disk, go to the sources directory and type setup.exe and press enter.

6. Now the Windows7 will start installing and everything will go on normally.

Happy installing!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.