There I was, in need of a way to install a legal copy of Windows 7 onto my wife's laptop. I had no DVD to burn the image to, no USB thumb drive big enough for it, and nowhere to go. Well, it just so happened that my generous step-dad gave us a good copy. What we didn't know was that it was the 64-bit version.
My wife's laptop is a dual-core, but not enough memory to truly utilize the x64 architecture at it's fullest. What to do, what to do. Well, my step-dad allowed me to log onto his technet account and download the correct version so as to have a better functional laptop. Here's where the fun starts. This wasn't that big of a fiasco, but it took me long enough to where I was up in the wee hours of the night installing drivers afterwards.
So, the download finished. I'd used virtual drives before to install OS's, but not over a LAN cable. Getting the picture now? Downloaded TFTP to do a PXE installation, but every time I booted her laptop it told me that it could not find BOOTMGR. Tried manually configuring my IP address, on MY laptop of course, and still wouldn't go. Well, as luck has it, I had to transfer the image contents to my wife's laptop on a separate partition than that which I was to install it to. Easier said than done.
Ended up using the DVD my step-dad had given us to install the x64 version of Win7, and it installed fine. Slow as molasses, but installed fine it did. During this installation, I went ahead and set up a big enough partition to house the ISO contents so as to install from it. When it finally transferred, I started setup.exe to begin the installation once again. This, in turn, allowed me to install the correct version and now I'm here writing this post while the drivers are installing. Whew! That was a mouth full!
For future reference: if anybody gives you a copy of any OS, make sure it is the correct architecture version for the computer you will be installing it to. ;)
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