URGENT please help!

lincsman

lincsman

Member
Hi there, and thanks for reading. So my neighbor had a bad virus on his laptop and asked me to wipe it (reformat) and reinstall windows. So I couldn't get it to boot off my windows flash drive, and it doesn't have a DVD drive so I put it into my desktop. It told me that I couldn't install windows on it because it was the wrong type of format, so I used command prompt to change it. I then went into, and this was after formatting it using windows setup and then changing the type of format, I went into system management and formatted it as a NTFS format. Using my desktop I managed to get it to install windows 7, except at the very end of the setup it said "could not install windows because windows was unable to configure certain devices." So I put it into the laptop and I still can't get the flash drive to boot, not am I able to change the boot security settings. The hard drive won't even boot at all, because it probably has nothing on it to boot with. I'm totally lost here and I need to get this done today. Thanks.
 
You can't install windows while the drive is in a different machine. What OS was originally installed? If it was windows 8 then most likely you have to disable secure boot in order to get it boot off a flash drive. A couple things you can do is...

Put the drive in your system and totally wipe it using dban or kill disk. Then put it back in original machine and install windows.
Check to make sure there are no errors on the drive as well.
 
ok so using my desktop, which you can do actually, I got windows 7 onto the hard drive but the laptop still isn't booting. I think I need a boot something on the HDD, like a boot sequencer or something.
 
talked to Acer support and I think I know the problem now. The BIOS only has UEFI or whatever it is, and Windows 7 and less uses legacy, which isn't in this laptop's BIOS. So in other words, unless I install Legacy into the BIOS, I'm going to have to just install windows 10 directly.
 
lincsman said:
ok so using my desktop, which you can do actually,
Click to expand...
Not really. If you install windows on a drive from a different machine then that install will be customized toward the machine you installed it in. Meaning all drivers for the hardware that was contained in your desktop not the laptop that it's designed for. If you go to put that install of windows from your desktop in the laptop, it will most likely boot loop on you or blue screen.
 
johnb35 said:
Not really. If you install windows on a drive from a different machine then that install will be customized toward the machine you installed it in. Meaning all drivers for the hardware that was contained in your desktop not the laptop that it's designed for. If you go to put that install of windows from your desktop in the laptop, it will most likely boot loop on you or blue screen.
Click to expand...
Probably for Windows 10. But I have installed Windows 7 several times on my desktop and put it into another machine. The trick is don't let it update or anything. As soon as it's installed, switch the hard drives. The laptop works fine now I installed Windows 10 with a flash drive on the laptop and it works great now.
 
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