Now that I’m in between assignments I thought I’d take the opportunity to install Windows 7 on my work laptop (a HP 8510w) in order to get better performance in my virtual machines. Several colleagues have already installed Windows 7 on their laptops of the same model, so I figured I’d take the plunge.

A colleague recommended that I should use a USB drive to install from as this would save me a lot of time and since I had read about the tool that Microsoft har released for this I figured that I would give it a go. Turns out that I had to download the tool from a CNET server because the tool has been pulled by Microsoft due to a license problem. Went ahead and prepared my 4 GB USB stick with the ISO and rebooted.

After having clicked the “Install Now” button all I get is a dialog telling me that I’m missing a CD/DVD device driver and tells me that I should browse for a location containing the drivers needed. That is misses a working driver is, in my view, utter bullshit. Why? Because when I browse for the drivers (which I don’t have by the way, because who needs drivers for a CD/DVD drive nowadays?) I can browse my hard drive (so it’s not a problem with not having a working hard drive to install to), a CD inserted into the CD drive, and the contents of the USB stick containing the Windows 7 installation.

Googleing the problem shows a bunch of people having this problem due to faulty burns of their DVDs, but this doesn’t apply to me since I’m using a USB stick to install (but I did re-prepare the USB stick three times just to be sure). The few people I’ve found that have had this problem haven’t had it with earlier versions of Windows 7 (betas and release candidates) and some of them seem to have cured the problem by changing the SATA configuration in their BIOSes (i.e. changing from SATA mode to IDE mode). One Microsoft site even suggests that the controller in the computer is not compatible with the AHCI driver provided by Microsoft. How the heck could it not be compatible when it’s been working without a problem in Windows Vista? Actually I thought about changing SATA settings in the BIOS, but I didn’t find any settings which solved this problem.

Tomorrow I’ll try to install from a DVD which is known to have worked for a bunch of my colleagues and see what happens then. But somehow I don’t really beleive in success. After having re-prepared the USB stick three times the corruption problem is most likely not what’s causing this, so it’s more likely that i’ve got a weird hardware revision of the laptop which screws this up.

Things like this want me to get a MacBook Pro and just forget about problems like these! Atleast there’s a greater chance to get Windows working virtually…