0

When I first installed win7 on laptop without any OS, installation went smooth, now however, when I try to reinstall win7 on existing win7 the installation asks me for drivers,my hard-disk is not shown in the initial step,beyond which I cannot go.

From device manager if I try to update the disk driver,Win tells that optimum drivers are installed

Browsing C drive for drivers and providing the location c\windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys is also not helping

Improve this question
2
  • 2
    Normally manufacturers include a separate OEM partition, and you should find the drivers you need here. If you perform a factory reset, the drivers are loaded from here as part of the recovery, but I presume you don't want to do that. If there isn't a separate partition, check for an OEM directory in the Windows recovery partition or any other pre-installed partitions. If you can't find them, you'll have to look on the manufacturer's support site.
    – AFH
    Commented Nov 28, 2017 at 14:16
  • Complementing the above, many manufacturers typically provide a recovery system that uses an image of the OS as it worked in the first use. That has all the factory installed drivers and software. When installing from scratch additional drivers are often required.
    – user772515
    Commented Nov 28, 2017 at 17:32

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

I cannot explain why it worked the first time but not the second. If you're getting a screen like below then there are two possible reasons.

enter image description here

You don't have the driver for your controller

Since you've already got Windows 7 running, boot into that and use Double Driver (it's portable, so no installation required) to backup your existing drivers to a USB stick. You can even use the same USB stick that you're using to install Windows if you want.

When you re-install Windows and it cannot see the hard drive, click on the option that allows you to load a driver and point it at right folder on the USB stick. It'll locate the correct driver, install it and then you'll be able to proceed.

The advantage of doing this way over just downloading the single driver is that any drivers which are still missing after installation can be re-installed by just pointing Device Manager to the folder on the USB stick.

The last thing you want is to re-install Windows and then find you are missing a driver for something rather essential - like WiFi or Ethernet.

Your installation type isn't correct

As Ramhound alluded to, you might be mixing up UEFI and Legacy Mode with MBR and GPT. If this is the case, then you won't be able to install anything to the hard drive and this answer should help you.

(as a side note, if you don't have access to your Windows and Office licence keys then you may want to use Advanced Tokens Manager to backup and then restore them. This won't work for Windows 10 though)

Improve this answer
6
  • Most likely the "HDD not seen" is not the issue (how would they browse C: from the installer if it really wasn't detected?). They are probably confusing not being detected with "unable to install" (because fully used with partitions) unless selecting/managing the system partition. Windows 7 requires drivers for many controllers but not for the run of the mill desktop SATA controllers.
    – user772515
    Commented Nov 28, 2017 at 17:41
  • I agree with MichaelBay this isn't a driver issue. Windows 7 has those built-in, what likely is the case, is mixing up UEFI and Legacy Mode with MBR and GPT. Windows is very particular, and the end result of not displaying a drive to install to, is the identical result not having a driver for the driver would produce. Third-party software isn't required to retrieve the Windows 7 license key, its printed on the sticker, attached to the device itself.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Nov 28, 2017 at 17:47
  • I read it that he is browsing for the location within Windows itself and then trying to put that location into the folder selector within the installer. Which would fail because nothing is mounted to C.
    – Richard
    Commented Nov 28, 2017 at 17:48
  • @Richard, Thank you, funny/strange thing happened, I took backup of the drivers with Double Driver on pendrive,kept it attached to laptop, booted with the win7 CD, my hard-drive was detected, but then installation was taking too long for decompressing the files, so I rebooted, this time without the pen-drive, the installation went smooth, never once was I asked for the drivers
    – Vikram
    Commented Nov 29, 2017 at 7:35
  • @Richard, all this trouble because of svchost.exe and svchost(netsvcs).exe kept running and occupying more than 1 GB of RAM with very high number of hard faults (>50) eventually crashing the system, many times I got the blue screen, tried several antivirus/malware tools but none helped, these two files created trouble only when I connect to the internet, if I am not connected to net then win7 worked fine
    – Vikram
    Commented Nov 29, 2017 at 7:41

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .