WIN7 Discovery/Find

[phly]

I made a very unique and interesting discovery/find that I would like to hear people weigh in on. So I have an old pentium 4 PC that i wanted to test out windows 10. It has 2GB Ram. Issue was the DVD drive was so slow and not reading my windows 10 DVD. I tried installing the same 64bit winodws 10 from a USB and it refused to boot even though pc can boot from USB. Made a win7 boot USB and tried to install and that too failed with the same boot file corruption error.
Weird. I was at a loss on what to do. Windows XP is too old for my design apps. I then found a win7 recovery disc I had made when backing up my windows 7 installation and ran it. Was able to boot from it and instead of choosing repair I chose Install. I wiped HD and installed an entire windows 7 64bit on my system from a recovery cd!! How is this possible? How can a simple recovery cd have all the files necessary to reinstall an entire operating system??

Can someone explain this? Is it even possible or some voodoo happened where my pc is concerned. I know the disk has crucial files required to sortout booting issues and alike but install files for the entire windows 7 which is 4GB iso standard. I just dont see how this was possible.

 

[LazyLion]

Was it an OEM system recovery disc or a user settings recovery disc?

 

[Arthur]

With Win7 Msft introduced a new image-based installation packaging format. As a matter of course that image is placed on recovery media.

 

[Swa]

Well technically every file is a boot file for windows, so yes, it needs to have all windows files included.

 

[phly]

It is an oem recovery disk. The one windows backup asks you to create when backing up windows so that you can use it to restore a Windows image. Mind you it never worked when I needed it to restore a system backup I had made. But a small CD is able to replace an entire win7 DVD. I can understand the booting part but installing the entire OS was something I didn't expect. Which means with a simple recovery disk one can install Windows on any system without needing an actual OS disk. Very interesting.

 

[sajunky]

Which means with a simple recovery disk one can install Windows on any system without needing an actual OS disk. Very interesting.

It might install on different hardware (nor sure), but it will not activate, as OEM certificate and activation keys are embedded in the image unless you install it on the same OEM motherboard (matching SLIC in the BIOS).

BTW, Why do you install 64-bit version on the system with 2GB RAM? Unless you have special needs, I tell you what to do:

- Extract OEM keys and OEM certificate from the existing installation. Google, or post request how to do it.

- Download Win 7 SP1 32-bit ISO, the same version as yours (SL, Home, Pro, Ultimate), but not 64-bit. I saw links on the digitalriver website, now you can find it directly on MS support site.

- Skip entering keys during installation, you get 30-days trial. Use MS command-line utilities to insert your OEM certificate and keys. It is the same operation as OEMs do.

You get fully legal licenced copy of Windows 7, free from OEM applications which are slowing down your system.

 

[phly]

It might install on different hardware (nor sure), but it will not activate, as OEM certificate and activation keys are embedded in the image unless you install it on the same OEM motherboard (matching SLIC in the BIOS).

BTW, Why do you install 64-bit version on the system with 2GB RAM? Unless you have special needs, I tell you what to do:

- Extract OEM keys and OEM certificate from the existing installation. Google, or post request how to do it.

- Download Win 7 SP1 32-bit ISO, the same version as yours (SL, Home, Pro, Ultimate), but not 64-bit. I saw links on the digitalriver website, now you can find it directly on MS support site.

- Skip entering keys during installation, you get 30-days trial. Use MS command-line utilities to insert your OEM certificate and keys. It is the same operation as OEMs do.

You get fully legal licenced copy of Windows 7, free from OEM applications which are slowing down your system.

The licencing part is not a problem at all. And I do have the key to my windows 7 product. Just the part that I could install at all that intrigued. I'm aware that 64bit is pointless on a system with less than 3gb ram however I had to install it because my design app (especially illustrator) will not install on a 32bit system and I'm trying to buy time while scouring the net for deals and bargains and hopefully settle on a system this month end.

I have a windows 7 home premium disk that came with my laptop but somehow ultimate sounds awesome. Once I get a new system, which will probably be a mac (once i have weighed the pros and cons of a windows vs Mac machine) probably that will run windows 10 through parallels so I wont be with windows 7 for long except on this home machine which will probably just be used for watching stuff when cousins come over and playing music.

 

[CataclysmZA]

It is an oem recovery disk. The one windows backup asks you to create when backing up windows so that you can use it to restore a Windows image. Mind you it never worked when I needed it to restore a system backup I had made. But a small CD is able to replace an entire win7 DVD. I can understand the booting part but installing the entire OS was something I didn't expect. Which means with a simple recovery disk one can install Windows on any system without needing an actual OS disk. Very interesting.

That's actually a DVD disc that you've used. It contains a slightly customised Windows 7 installation on it made by the OEM, which also includes some pre-installed drivers for hardware that shipped after Windows 7 was released. It won't work for restoring system backups because it's actually not a recovery disc, it's just a full Windows 7 installer. The wording used by the OEMs is a little confusing, and in most cases they allow you to boot off a recovery partition that they've set up anyway.

This is the setup process that I can start in Windows 10 to create the same type of disc from scratch. I have the option to turn it into a full installation DVD if I want to.

View attachment 343661

This is why I tend to keep HP's OEM discs, because they have drivers that allow installation on almost any hardware setup and work with activating product keys from different key pools (like MSDN or retail). The only other manufacturer which I know sets their discs up the same way is Fujitsu Siemens. The HP Windows 7 discs that ship with Skylake systems are very, very useful because they include the USB drivers which allow your USB hardware to work inside the installer.