Issues installing Windows 7

Hi everyone.

A few days ago, I picked up a new laptop (HP 15 ac128nm) that arrived without an operating system pre-installed. I went ahead and installed Windows 10 via a USB drive, and honestly, everything is running smoothly—but I’ve hit a massive wall trying to perform a clean installation of Windows 7. Every time I attempt to boot from my USB, I get stuck with this frustrating error: "Load Drivers | A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing." Just to be clear, I’ve already verified that the bootable USB works perfectly fine on every other computer I’ve tested it on, and I even tried using a different USB stick entirely, but nothing changes. Since this laptop doesn't have a built-in DVD-ROM, I actually went out and bought some adapter cables to connect an external DVD-ROM via USB; however, while the drive shows up just fine once I'm inside Windows 10, it’s completely invisible to the BIOS. I've already made sure the BIOS is updated to the latest version and I've cycled through both the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, but no luck there either.

Does anyone have any insight into what might be causing this? 😵

That’s a tough spot to be in—mostly because Windows 7 is pretty ancient by now, dating all the way back to 2009. Looking at the HP website under the driver section, it does say they support Windows 7, but that "missing" error you're seeing during setup? I'm guessing it's hunting for a chipset driver. That’s likely what's stalling the whole installation process. You’ll probably need to grab those specific Windows 7 chipset drivers from the HP site and bake them right into the installer. Basically, you're looking at building a fresh ISO that has both Windows 7 and the drivers pre-integrated... Oh, and one more thing—Windows 7 doesn't actually support USB 3.0 out of the box, so make sure you plug your flash drive into a USB 2.0 port when you try to install, otherwise, it won't see it.

http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2011/01/a...tallation-iso/

There is one massive headache when trying to run Windows 7 on modern laptops. Most newer hardware simply doesn't support it, and even if you manage to get it installed, almost nothing works—your mouse and USB ports often end up completely dead. If you are truly willing to deal with the hassle of setting up Windows 7, I suggest following the steps Larry Ortiz5 provided.

Thanks to both of you—I'll give that a shot. I also noticed in the BIOS there's an option for "OS Selection" that lists Windows, Windows 7, and Android, or something along those lines. Plus, looking at the driver list, it seems like everything should run smoothly if I go ahead with the installation.

In case anyone else is running into this, I finally figured out a workaround:

Joshua Jones11 said:In case anyone's looking for a fix, here's what worked for me:

So, turns out you really did have to bake that driver right into the Windows installation...