5

I downloaded an ISO of Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit From Digital River to try to restore a laptop.

I downloaded the ISO and burned it to a Memorex DVD and tried to boot the laptop from it using the boot options but the laptop acted like there was no disk in the drive and booted from the Hard Drive like normal.

I tried another boot disk to see if it was the DVD drive but the laptop booted to that disk just fine.

Am I burning this disk wrong? Any ideas?

Lenovo g570

MalwareManiac
  • 832
  • 1
  • 6
  • 19
  • If you look at the disc on an existing computer, what do you see on it? – John Dec 12 '12 at 14:16
  • @john It has 5 folders labeled boot, efi, sources, support, and upgrade. Then it has 4 files, autorun.inf, bootmgr, bootmgr.efi, and setup.exe – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 14:37
  • Please specify the application you use to burn the dvd. – pleinolijf Dec 12 '12 at 14:38
  • @pleinolijf windows 7 burner – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 14:39
  • @pleinolijf yes and I didnt find anything that gave me a clue as to what went wrong – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 14:44
  • Can you confirm that you burned the image as a boot image ? This is crucial information that you should add to your question. – pleinolijf Dec 12 '12 at 14:46
  • @pleinolijf That is kind of the point of the question... how do I do that? I have an iso and I right-clicked and hit burn image. Do I have to change a setting somewhere? I dont see any setting in the windows 7 burner – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 14:49
  • Hence my comment about looking that up online ;) Though I must admit it's hard with those keywords: "Windows 7 Disk Image Burner"... – pleinolijf Dec 12 '12 at 14:51
  • Very few drives still have this issue, but is there any chance you used a DVD+R instead of a DVD-R? Like I said, not terribly common of an issue anymore - but I know it has, at least a few times, caused issues for specific drives. (The Lenovo one didn't have enough spec information on their site to judge that). – nerdwaller Dec 12 '12 at 15:06
  • Iam using a DVD-R – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 15:07

3 Answers3

4

That's because you probably have not burned a boot sector or boot image on the DVD. The program you use to burn DVDs will have an option that you can check to burn a bootable DVD.

Judging from the screenshot on this page, it doesn't look like there's an option to burn a bootable disc in Windows Disk Image Burner.

If you can't do it with the built-in Win7 burner, these are two solid, free-to-use dvd burning programs, that might be more straightforward to use:

pleinolijf
  • 1,551
  • 10
  • 17
  • 2
    While hopefully this works, I have never had an issue burning any bootable media from W7 Burner. Though, it doesn't have speed controls and everything that the others have. @MalwareManiac - When you re-burn, try doing it with a slower speed with verification selected as well. Sounds like just a bad burn, lower speeds tend to help avoid those. – nerdwaller Dec 12 '12 at 15:09
  • @nerdwaller you may be right cause my friend just yesterday made a bootable disk that worked just fine with the same burner – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 15:11
  • @MalwareManiac - Yeah, it sometimes just fails or the DVD is just poor quality so the laser doesn't encode it right or whatever. Windows kind-of failed in having options in their burner (probably trying to make it simple). The ones pleinolijf mentions should give you the extra control to help ensure a better burn. – nerdwaller Dec 12 '12 at 15:13
  • I used a different dvd and a different burner and it worked! Thanks for the help – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 15:37
  • Yup, you just get bad discs or bad batches sometimes. I remember having used Windows to burn a setup DVD in a pinch and it booted just fine. However, I highly recommend ImgBurn. – Karan Dec 12 '12 at 18:02
  • @Karan yes I think I have a batch of bad disks because I tried to make a ubuntu disk the same way with the same memorex disks and it failed also. The second time I used verbatim disks and they worked great. Also used ImgBurn the second time and I think that will be my default burner from now on – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 18:07
0

I had the same problem, but I burned about 10 dvd's to realize that I didn't download the right iso file from the net. Slower speeds tend to help avoid bad burning. You shoul try Daemon tools advanced pro - it has everything You need to make an image from about any file and burn it or emulate it or whatever.

Vladislav
  • 1
  • Welcome to Super User! Please read [How do I recommend software](https://meta.superuser.com/questions/5329/how-do-i-recommend-software-in-my-answers/5330#5330) for some tips as to how you should go about recommending software. You should provide at least a link, some additional information about the software itself, and how it can be used to solve the problem in the question. – DavidPostill Dec 17 '16 at 10:35
0

When I've had problems with a DVD that failed to boot (usually some flavor of Linux), it was because I failed to compare the published MD5 or SHA1 checksums.

Jerry Sweeton
  • 127
  • 1
  • 9
  • Thks for your answer though that is not the case here because I used the same ISO with a different burner and disk and it worked just fine – MalwareManiac Dec 12 '12 at 18:14